


Seer: Recall

by Kuronrko98



Series: Maladaptive Daydreaming Work: The Cube and Related Universes [17]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Death, Connor/The Seer/Damien, Depersonalization, Jack doesn't count bc he's a different one, No canon Homestuck characters outside of passing mentions, Other, Self-Insert, Suicidal Thoughts, The Seer/Connor, The Seer/Damien, Timeline Shenanigans, do not copy to another site, the relationships arent a main focus of this so ill just tag them here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 11:11:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18570247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kuronrko98/pseuds/Kuronrko98
Summary: The Seer had quite a life before they ended up in this timeline. Whether it was a good one or not is up for debate.





	1. You Ended the Universe and All You Got Were These Dead Friends

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time using the Homestuck skin, so it's sure to be weird. This gives some context about the Seer and why they're so obsessed with making the timeline go right.

⬜

I can never say I haven’t had family. Growing up might have been crazy, I might barely know my parents, but that’s not what I mean.

I’ve always had the Collective. They were my family, even if they weren’t each others’. Jezebeth might have always gotten on my nerves, Jay was a reclusive mess, but we were something. It was something I didn’t have in the real world.

It’s.

It’s something the real version of me doesn’t have.

Our real lives have been the same, everything the same, as far as I can tell. We were both as alone, read the same things, gained and lost the same friends. We both ran from our problems more than we faced them. We wanted and tried to die at the same times, moved, made a new life, moved again, all in tandem until we got to college.

But in the Cube it got… messy.

They locked themself in the Room when Connor left. They only came out when it was their turn to be in the real world. They hid and ground their head into those journals so much they couldn’t remember what it was like not to be numb. They forgot what it was like to have their mind be their own. It took him coming back and another year and a half for them to realize that wasn’t working.

I, uh. Decided that it was a bad idea within a week.

There are a ton of splits in the timelines that brought us where we are. Some of them made more of an impact on the outcome than others. That one, I think was a big one. That somehow led to everything else.

It brought me here, and I guess that’s something.

But they aren’t as close to their Collective as I am to mine. There’s a lot of anger pointed at them. It’s no wonder, I guess, that they would have chosen to stay in the Room so long with everything being held against them.

So, they’ve been spending a lot of time with me. They claim that I annoy the shit out of them, but we still end up in the same place more often than not.

They don’t ask about their session anymore. They don’t ask what anyone’s title is or what the outcome will be. They keep their nose out of it now that I’ve refused their questions enough.

But they went through with the Gregor daydream like I told them to, so I owe them some answers. Not about _that_ , but about something.

And that’s how we got here. Their birthday’s on Friday. They’ve already started panicking about the new universe. They’re scared. They’ve broken down twice since this morning. Their roommate sits on their bed behind me, but they don’t think they can talk about it with them.

This isn’t a real world problem, you see. They can’t get real world people involved. Not with the damn fatigue they brought on themself. Not with their fears of what the game will bring.

I’m the closest thing they have, I guess.

“What—” They avert their eyes and drum their fingers on the rumpled bedspread. A cartoon cat smiles from the blanket under their hand. “What exactly happened? In your session, I mean.”

They’ve danced around this question before. I’ve danced around answers. Snappy things, things I check the script to make sure they’ll stop the conversation before it starts. ‘Everyone died,’ ‘We lost,’ and ‘It was a _doomed_ timeline’ normally do the trick.

Like I said, though, they deserve answers.

“You know the whole ‘coffeeshop AU’ you have going on?” I ask, eyes on their hand instead of their face. I can’t look at them. I still feel the feedback of their nod. “It started a lot like that. It was—”

I remember the look on Connor’s face when he realized what the game really was. Jax’s sudden silence. The shattered hope when Damien died. A dark cave and a vast loneliness.

Hephaestus.

I can’t do this.

They straighten up abruptly and I actually look at them. “You don’t have to.”

I shake my head without letting my eyes leave theirs.

They’re so scared. I feel it from their every pore, from each crevice and winding thought in their mind. They’ve been scared of this daydream catching up with them for months. It’s time, now, and the worst case scenario might help.

I take a shaky breath and hold out a hand. I keep contact with their watery eyes before I close mine. I don’t need to tell them what I’m doing. They’ve done this plenty. They run out of words just as often as I do.

They know enough to take my hand and let me show them.

🕛

Your name is SAWYER PERRY.

Today is your TWENTIETH BIRTHDAY and you REALLY AREN’T THAT JAZZED ABOUT IT. Your BED is a mess as usual, the rest of the room is NOT MUCH BETTER. A few stacks of TEXTBOOKS litter your DESK. More importantly, your SHITTY LAPTOP sits open in front of you and a blank WORD PROCESSOR blinks in silent judgement on the screen. A DYING PLANT throws shade on your hands as they hover over the keys, and you take moment to lament the BEAUTIFUL LEAVES it had at the beginning of the summer.

You don’t have many of your personal items here, as you stowed most of them at your UNCLE’S HOUSE since moving to THE CITY. Anyone who saw your room might say that you’re a LITTLE BIT OF A DISASTER, and you would agree. The only things that look to have been placed with any care are the SET OF GAME SLEEVES in a cleared out space on your DESK.

But that’s enough strangely self-aware narration from you, you have a dinner to weasel your way out of. You click into Pesterchum instead.

functionalDisaster [FD] began pestering  probablySleeping [PS]

FD: Hey, first of all happy birthday! Before I, you know, say my other thing.  
FD: Which is idk if I’m gonna be able to make it to dinner.  
FD: Bc I have a ton of homework already, and I know I’ll be exhausted after game night. I’m already tired and we haven’t even started yet…   
FD: If it’s too late and your mom will be mad or whatever I can still come I swear. Idk if I’ll be in a good state of mind. I don’t want to make a bad impression.  
FD: And you know how my brain just kind of GOES when I get too tired. I don’t want to snap at her or get pissy or anything. I don’t want to ruin anything.  
FD: And I know you’re gonna come on here and be all ‘hurr durr my moms gonna love you be nice to yourself dummy’ but you don’t know that and I don’t know that and most of all my BRAIN doesn’t know that so it won’t let go of the fear that she’s gonna take one look at me in a bad mood and banish me from both her house and your life.  
FD: Not to say I would just disappear if your mom didn’t approve of me obviously she’d have to either get you to agree or idk kill me to get me to just go but still.  
PS: Hurr durr my moms gonna love you be nice to yourself dummy  
PS: Also happy birthday ;)  
FD: I’m gonna go to dinner just so I can murder you.  
PS: Thats fair but also  
PS: My moms making pumpkin pie  
FD: …  
FD: Keep talking  
PS: I told her you like to make it and its your favorite pie etc etc and she wanted to make a good impression  
PS: The mother is just as scared of you as you are of it babe  
FD: Stop being cute, it makes it hard to be scared and hate my birthday!!  
PS: Maybe you dont have to be scared of it up here just let my mom give you free food and swoon over your hair like the cool mom she desperately wants to be  
FD: Family dinners have never been my friend, dude  
PS: Then pretend its a dumb work thing doesnt orientation have things like this didnt you like just have a big dinner thing with them  
FD: Stop that, with your knowing about my life and having uh. Insight. Or whatever.  
PS: Obviously im not gonna make you go if you dont want to  
PS: But i do want you there and my mom wants you there and i think deep down you want to be there too  
FD: ;^;  
FD: Fine, I’ll be there  
FD: Do I need to get Kane to give me a ride, or am I being chauffeured?  
PS: Ill pick you up at 7:30  
PS: Youre going to kanes?  
FD: He has better WiFi than the school. Besides, I don’t want to bother Madi while we’re playing  
FD: I should probably head out soon, actually  
PS: Cool ill see you tonight then  
FD: See you <3  
PS: <3

probablySleeping [PS] ceased pestering  functionalDisaster [FD]

You glare at the screen without any real heat and snap the thing shut. It doesn’t take long to get ready to go, but you find yourself lingering for whatever reason. Something doesn’t feel right.

No, something feels terribly wrong, in fact.

The feeling infects your gut. It’s normal, fine, not exactly a new occurrence, but that doesn’t mean you like it. You stand perfectly still in the middle of the dorm with Connor’s present clutched in your hands.

A message pings from your phone and prompts you to actually drop the gift bag in your sylladex. Whatever the feeling is, you push it to the back of your mind.

The message is just a reminder that the game starts at four thirty (half an hour from now) from Jax. Alm*st time, just an*ther thirty minutes! D* n*t w*rry if y*u f*rget s*mething, y*u can always c*me back later! is kind of a weird way to word it, but you aren’t about to judge. Ze’s just kind of weird sometimes.

You shake the discomfort away. Your uncle is expecting you soon. The last thing you need is him nosing into your business. So, you captchalogue your copies of SCUBE and hurry out.

That unsettled feeling lingers throughout the MAX ride over the river. It really doesn’t help your nerves over tonight’s dinner. Or over the whole online game aspect of it all, since MMOs have never actually been your forte. The dread only fades when you walk through Kane’s front door.

“Happy birthday!” he calls from out of sight. There’s a slight pause, then, “Cutting it a little close, ain’tcha?”

You flip him off as you pass the open living room door. The only sign he sees is the cackle that follows you down the hall and into your own room.

🕛

“Hey, wait.”

My hand falls into my lap when they let go of it. I open my eyes, though they remain unfocused and pointed out the window behind my host. It’s not as strange to snap back than I expected. No feedback. Connor is still dead, Kane still didn’t make it, but it doesn’t give me whiplash. That universe still failed no matter how many times I revisit it.

“How do you already have questions?” I mutter.

I actually look at them when they hesitate. They’re still worried, obviously, but having a bone to chew at has to help. Whatever irritation I have isn’t enough to keep them from saying what’s on their mind. “I already knew about Dominic and Jordan. But it sounds like they aren’t the only ones you didn’t have. Who all was in your session?”

Oh.

“Me and Connor, obviously, then Jax and Damien.” I shrug. Make it sound like nothing. It’s fine, right? We left Madi behind and I had to be fine with that, had to be okay or we’d _all_ die. “All of this beginning stuff feels like so long ago.”

They shift uncomfortably. “You can skip anything that, uh—”

“I planned on it.” It’s like they think I don’t know how to tell a story. We’re practically the same person for fuck’s sake.

They fall silent. This time, they hold their hand out. It’s an option. I could refuse to give them anything else if I wanted to. But this is probably good for me. Hal told me I should talk to Sawyer about everything that happened.

I might as well.

I reach for their hand and we start again.

🕐

“What do you mean, it’s a _meteor?_ ” Connor screams on your screen. “Did you know this would happen?”

You can’t see what Jax says, Connor’s computer is at the wrong angle, but it can’t be good. His knuckles turn white where they curl around the edges of the cruxite dowel. After a beat, his face goes slack and he glances up at the cursor over his head.

“Alright,” he concedes, to what you still aren’t sure. “Don’t think I’m not still _pissed_ , but I’d rather hate you alive than dead.”

_Dead?_

Connor slams his computer shut and leaves his room at a jog. The kernelsprite lets out a static laden bark and as close to scampers after him as a ghost dog/game abstraction could be said to do. You follow with your cursor in case he needs help. When he turns down the stairs, he slows a little.

“I hope you meet Jax before I do,” he mutters. He turns from the second floor landing into the guest room I put the alchemiter in. “Because I might fucking _kill_ zim for this.”

You don’t know what to say. Your fingers hover over the keys while he fusses with the strange device. He asks you whether his mom is still in the house, so you hunt through the building only to find her already getting ready for dinner.

Dinner.

Tears spring to your eyes. You scrub at them angrily because you don’t have _time_ for this! There’s only thirty seconds left on that countdown!

You jump back to the alchemiter room to find something… strange.

Twenty-five.

Light threads together on the pad to create a pale gray bookcase. Most of the contents are pretty streamlined, but one book stands out. Kind of like in old animation where you’d just _know_ what part of the scene moves because it’s so much more detailed. It’s still smooth and fairly nondescript, but it pokes out more than the rest.

Fifteen.

Connor, obviously, climbs up and reaches for the book.

Ten.

He takes it, retreats back onto the floor when the bookcase itself vanishes.

Six.

He inspects the book, its spine and its covers. The angle isn’t good enough, you can’t see if it says anything.

One.

He flips the book open at the same time a light flashes.

The screen goes dark, save for the server control panel. You stare at it, unable to comprehend just what this means, until the shockwave hits.

You don’t even try to stay in your seat. You end up on the floor, next to the bed you think. You wait, eyes closed, for the tremors to stop.

The meteor hit. Connor was there and now he’s just. Not.

“Sawyer, you okay?” Kane calls when the house stops shaking. The door opens a moment later, and you see his relief that you’re already sitting up. “Oh, good. Stay inside, alright? I’m gonna go—”

“No!” You scramble to your feet. He might irritate the shit out of you, but you don’t want him to _die!_ “Please, don’t leave me here.”

He hesitates. He shoots a glance at his watch, which lights up and beeps a few times, then looks back to you. After a second he deflates.

“Alright.” He leans against the doorway. “I’ll do as much damage control as I can here. I’ll have to go eventually, though, you know that right?”

You nod vehemently and sag back onto your bed. “Yeah, I just—yeah. Thanks.”

His gaze strays around your room. He raises a brow at something, then turns to go. “Quit spying on your boyfriend, weirdo,” he says. He closes the door behind him.

You flick a glance at the computer.

Connor’s there. In tears and calling for his mom, but there. Alive. He’s alive.

You flop back onto your bed only to find a cursor just like the one you were controlling in Connor’s house over your head. It just sort of hovers there, then tries to click on you like the asshole Damien is. Your phone pings on the desk, and you stand on shaky legs to check.

Damien, he claims, is going to rescue you from a meteor of your own. Connor only had ten minutes to save himself. Something tells you you won’t be so lucky.

Happy birthday.

🕐

This time, I’m the one that pulls back. I can’t experience this as, well, an experience again. I only know what actually happened in the most academic sense. I know what I knew, I know how those last six minutes in my home universe left our group. Fuck if I know the specifics of what I did.

“What happened?” they murmur.

I fuss with the edges of the gear on my chest. Only two of us reached god tier. He deserved to survive more than I did. Then again, that’s kind of why he _didn’t_.

“Kane lied,” I say without feeling it. “He thought I wouldn’t notice if he slipped out. So he did. By the time Damien told me he wasn’t in the house, I only had a minute to enter the Medium. I didn’t see him again. Connor found his mom, though.”

They don’t say anything. They fuss on their phone, likely to keep Madi from asking if they’re okay. How do you answer that, when you’re panicking about a life that isn’t even yours? Their fear is dark, held close to their body. Their Connor told me about this, about how scared they’ve been since he came back from his self-imposed exile. The murky fog that trails after them wherever they go. He doesn’t know where it came from.

Neither do I. I don’t know why they’re so much more skittish about everything than I am.

I do still hate the heavy silence, though, so after a few minutes of it I go on.

“That was the first time I had a real vision, too. When the meteor hit I saw Jax—though I didn’t know it was zim at the time, obviously.” I wave a dismissive hand in an attempt to break the things I’m saying away from reality. My reality, at least. “Ze made the mistake of self-prototyping before ze entered the Medium.”

“Oh.” They wince. Yeah, they get it.

“Yeah.” I grimace at the memory. “What I saw was zim dying. It was—I didn’t see when it actually happened, but ze ended up prototyping with an imp once ze got through. Ze only lasted a few minutes.”

Long enough to effectively save this timeline.

“So, that’s how ze ended up going,” Sawyer muses. They sigh. “Jay’s gonna kill me if anything happens to Jax in my session.”

I don’t know about that, but they probably know their Jay better than I do.

“Don’t even pretend you don’t think so.” They straighten up and, whoops, I must have thought that too hard. “You wouldn’t even let them know Jax was a _player_ until this morning. You know exactly how they can be.”

I guess.

I nudge their foot with mine and we move on.

🕑

LOSAT.

Land of Scribes and Tracks.

Not train tracks, oh no! More like those shitty games they have at playgrounds and dentist’s offices. The former hug the surface of my planet, huge… something’s shifting along them with a distant roar. The latter curl through the air. They’re much faster, smaller. You can’t tell what the things that zip along them are, but they make you nervous.

This whole thing makes you nervous.

You try to ignore the tinny pings from outside. You have to make the house defensible. One room at a time, right?

You’ve already secured your room. You told your sprite (Damien has lovingly dubbed him DipplantSprite but you refuse to use anything but his name) to let you know if your shitty warding doesn’t keep the imps out. You wouldn’t be surprised, considering it pretty much consists of baby gates throughout the halls and an ‘imp-proof doorknob’ you alchemized out of a baby-proof knob and the lock off a hamster cage.

You try not to think of the others hanging out in your sylladex. Try not to think about your instinct to show Kane what you made. How stupid that is because of how _dead_ he is. You’ll just be grateful he used to babysit you and your sister and—

Nope not thinking about that either! Not gonna think about how many people are dead! Not Kane, not your parents, _certainly_ not your sister and her daughter! There’s nothing you can do about it, so just don’t go there.

Killing imps should not be this easy on autopilot.

You drop onto the couch and glare at the grist scattered across the living room. All the doors into the room have been imp-proofed. You can actually sit down and chill the fuck out. If that was a good idea, you would do that at least.

Instead, you take out your phone to message Jax.

functionalDisaster [FD] began pestering  atmosphericInertia [AI]

FD: Are you in yet?  
FD: Connor said you were doing something weird and I want to make sure you don’t get stuck like Damien.  
FD: Which I will absolutely keep blaming you for! I know he’s fine, I get that, we’ve all talked to him, but still!  
FD: But message me soon, I’ve got some Questions™ for you.  
AI: * *am h*r* //++s*rry *t t**k s* l*ng/  
FD: …  
FD Are you okay?  
AI: N*/+-  
AI: B*t * d* n*t/++ <h*v* t*/>me t* w*st*::”}  
AI: * *am s*rry /><<y** w*ll n*t b*(( *bl* t* *sk y**r q//:**st**ns  
FD: You’re scaring me. What’s going on?  
AI: D**s n*t m*tt*r//- Y** h*v* t* d* s*m*th*ng,,,!?  
FD: ??? What?  
AI: G* s** //””% y**r d*n*z*n@>> l*t*r  
FD: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOURE SAYING  
AI: H*ph**st*s. Y**r//%/ d*n*z*n!!/  
AI: Wh*n *t/((-=) *s j*st y**;:<  
AI: H* w*ll h*lp y**  
FD: JAX WHAT IS GOING ON  
FD: PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOURE OKAY  
AI: //#;%%/  
AI: *((//?@^  
AI: N* >>/////$  
AI: * h*v* &??> t* g*  
AI: S*rry

atmosphericInertia [AI] is an idle chum!

You stare at your phone. You don’t know what to do.

Connor adds you and Damien to a memo. The first thing you see when you click on it is a set of four screenshots of your dorm. A humanish sprite faces off with an imp. Then the two fuse slightly.

The new JaximpSprite stares blankly at the viewpoint. Then the dorm is empty save for a small cache of grist.

You close out of the memo and stand. That’s enough of sitting. You can’t do that. You have to keep going. No more thinking, no more waiting. Avoidance might not be a healthy way to deal with this, but it might keep anyone else from being dead.

🕑

“But what about zir dream self?”

I shake my head, shake _myself_ out of the memory. “We waited for days to see if ze’d show up from Prospit. Dersite agents killed zim before ze got word to us.”

And the only reason I know _that_ is my damn curiosity and access to the time trails once I was alone. I got to see that if I had entered from my dorm instead of Kane’s house Jax would have stayed on zir own server instead of infecting PSU. Ze would have been able to save zir creator and I would have saved Madi. Oh, yeah, _and_ Damien wouldn’t have lost his extra life.

Kane would be dead, but he was dead _anyway_.

There are a lot of ‘could have’s in my memory, I guess. Not that they matter. All of that could have happened, all it would have done is doom me even more completely in the end.

“And Damien?” they ask, quiet as a whisper. “You mentioned him. What happened?”

“The meteor hit before he got through.” I shrug. “His dream self woke up, though, and I didn’t even know until he blew my Pesterchum up over it. It didn’t seem that important at the time.”

“‘At the time,’” they repeat. “I’m guessing that’s our next stop.”

“And you say you don’t get time as an aspect,” I tease.

🕒

It’s been three weeks.

You’ve all been to Jax’s planet. It doesn’t take much rooting around to get the picture that you won’t be able to win this game without zim. The three of you haven’t said it out loud, but you all read the slabs. Something about a forge, something about frogs.

You had a little memorial thing at the edge of the planet’s volcano. Other than that, you’ve all been questing.

Damien mostly does his own thing. You haven’t seen him in more than a week, not since he stormed out of your room. He pushed and pressed until he realized you weren't going to talk about anything deeper than your consorts. You aren't ready for that yet, you have too much to do to break down. He claims you're not coping well in his daily messages, but who is? How do you cope with the destruction of everything you've ever known?

You and Connor have been meeting up every day for lunch. You stay at his place at night instead of yours so you don’t have to think about anyone you lost. He lets you be, allows you to stare out the window at the twinkling lights in the distance in silence. He lets you stall and deflect and complain about stupid shit with only minimal side eye.

Connor’s mom cooks you dinner, which is bizarre.

Somehow, even though you’ve spent about the same amount of time questing around, Connor has made a ton more progress than you have. Maybe it’s just that you keep getting distracted by the tiny, busywork questlines. Maybe it’s how easy it is to get sidetracked by the rollercoasters of the overhead tracks.

Or, maybe you’ve been seeing some signs. Reading too many inscriptions. You want to be wrong about the dots you’ve connected, so you ignore them. If you actually let yourself think too much, you get a little fucked up. It’s easier to just not. You’ve almost beaten Walkr, though, so you guess that’s a win. Right?

Bottom line, Connor’s pretty much one fight away from the top rung of his echeladder. You can’t even see the top of yours, but you’re not in any hurry. Once you finish your quests, after all, what else is there for you to do? He’s still gonna come to your planet with you later to force you to actually do some questing. Something, anything, as long as it gets done.

Anyway, it’s lunch time in the Land of Glow and Shadow.

Mrs. Sawyer has taken it upon herself to make sure you don’t starve to death. You know, since you forgot to eat _before_ the universe ended. So you always show up to a table full of sandwiches or soup or salad in the afternoons.

You never know how to react. It doesn’t feel real.

“What does she do all day?” you ask in a whisper. “Like, is she okay?”

Connor gives you a very pointed look. “Are _you_ okay?”

Oops, wrong answer! You wave a hand airily and frame it again. “At least we have other shit to distract us. She shouldn’t have to do this.”

“I don’t know.” He spears a piece of broccoli without looking at you. “What she does, I mean. I’m only ever here when you are.”

The interim silence stretches a beat too long.

“She said she knew Kane,” he says suddenly. “I showed her a picture of the two of you on our birthday. She ‘helped him out when he found his daughter,’ whatever that means.”

Your brow furrows and you drop your fork in the bowl. “He doesn’t have any kids.”

He opens his mouth to speak, but his words turn to static. He stops talking when you squint at him, but he looks. Wrong. Too bright.

He points at something behind you and when you look you forget how to breathe. It plays like a film reel. Over-saturated, jerky. Clips of fear and dread interrupt the vision, a horror show that has tears in your eyes before you even see what’s happening.

Damien cartwheels over the springy surface of his planet. An image of Connor screaming blacks the acrobatic out for a second, but you get to see him stick a landing before another picture of blood spreading from the shadows of a cave takes over.

He takes a running start, then leaps into a more complex flip.

A Dersite’s hand separated from their wrist.

He touches down with his hands to go airborne again.

A shattered phone, still lit with ten missed calls.

Damien’s feet hit the ground, but instead of trampolining him back upward it shatters. The cavern below is bright, too bright to be underground like this. He falls for a second, cries out something you can’t hear, and hits the ground.

He stares at the _something_ sticking through his chest. You blink back into Connor’s kitchen and realize it was a tree branch.

You shoot up from the table and dart out of the room. Your phone is to your ear before you can even register what you saw. A voice calls your name, but you have to get to the gate. The last one came before anyone got hurt, maybe you can stop it this time.

The call goes to voicemail. You curse and try again.

“Come _on!_ ”

He doesn’t answer.

You look back once, before you enter the gate at the top of an open-air staircase. Once is enough to stop you. Connor meets your eyes from the bottom.

With a basilisk’s tongue glitched through his neck.

Your phone falls from your hand. You don’t make the conscious decision to wait to find Damien. You don’t make a decision at all when you all but fall down the stairs—later, you’ll find yourself lucky for not falling _off_ the stairs—to get to Connor. You don’t realize you’d drawn a weapon until the basilisk has turned to grist and several imps scattered around the landing inch back warily.

You turn to Connor too slow, too late to keep him from tumbling over the edge of the structure.

You don’t remember the run down to the surface level. Not at all. Your memory jumps directly from watching him slip out of sight to sprinting out the front door to find your boyfriend being toted away by twenty green lizard consorts.

Your memory blanks out again to a part of Connor’s land you’ve never seen before. A still pond, a thin path that snakes over the surface, and a stone bed on an island in the center of the thing. You know it’s only been a few minutes by virtue of the few game abilities you’ve unlocked, but the only light here comes from somewhere under the water even though it should be daytime.

You trail silently behind the consorts that lag behind the others until you’ve joined the crowd around the bed where Connor has been rested. No one says anything, so you don’t either.

Is this some kind of funeral? Did you just lose both Damien and Connor at once? You don’t know what to do. You don’t know what to _feel._

So you just stare in silence with the consorts.

What are you going to tell his mom?

That’s _exactly_ the kind of thought that doesn’t come with the phrase _just stare in silence!_ Shut up, brain!

You don’t notice when the first moth lands on the bed. Hell, you’re so busy trying not to exist here that you don’t notice the giant gray moths until they’ve covered half the bed and swarmed Connor’s neck.

You yelp and take a step forward to wave them away, but a couple weird little consort hands touch your leg. You don’t want to mess up whatever ritual this is, or whatever, but! You have a feeling! Connor’s mom will be much more upset about finding out her son is dead if a bunch of moths eat him!

Because you’re not freaking out because _you_ have feelings about this or anything! Nope! Sawyer Perry doesn’t have any feelings right now, come again later!

You muddle through that thought process for a hot second. By the time you come to the conclusion that, no, you should probably not let a horde of possibly-flesh-eating moths eat your boyfriend’s body even though you absolutely do not have thoughts about this thing that is happening no matter what the traitorous tears that don’t quite slip from your bastard eyes might say, the green (but really, it’s teal, and wow Connor might have been onto something when he said you need to work on processing shit) of the bed is completely obscured.

You ignore the consorts’ collective hiss and take another step.

So, obviously, you think it’s your doing when the moths all flutter off into whatever pit of hell they came from. You think you got in the way of whatever funeral rite the consorts were performing and now they’re probably going to drown you in the lake or something before they call the moths back to finish the job. You think this because you turn to watch the moths go rather than at what you’re absolutely certain is going to be the half-eaten body of your boyfriend.

Ex-boyfriend? Is he still your boyfriend if he’s dead? How are you supposed to classify that?

Yeah, you might be in shock.

You’re so busy, in fact, not looking at your dead boyfriend that you don’t realize he is 1. not dead and 2. trying to get your attention until he grabs your hand and you almost dive into the fucking lake. Well, you rip your hand away and stumble a few steps back into the crowd of consorts, but that’s—

_He literally could not have survived a fall from the gate!_

“Sawyer, wh—calm down it’s just me.” Connor snickers at his own meme. You stare blankly at him. “What happened?”

He sits on the edge of the stone bed. Any wounds he had and his clothes from before are gone. His new outfit matches the teal of the bed. A darker, snug hood hides his hair and makes him look extremely silly. The cape kinda makes up for it though. That and the fact that he’s _alive._

You hope that Panic shirt is still around somewhere, you bought the damn thing for him.

“You were dead,” you say over the consorts’ excited hissing.

A _series_ of emotions cross his face. He lunges off the bed at the same time your knees give out and you have the idle thought you’re lucky that you didn’t land on a lizard.

It would be extremely cinematic if this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you broke down here, sobbed, cried, screamed out every single bad thing you’ve buried since entering the game. Since before that, really. It would be fitting, and cinematic, and it would be a good time for it.

Because Connor zips over the crowd of lizards—surprise, he can apparently fly now—and crushes you in a hug. A desperate contact that makes you long to cling to him just as tightly even through the static in your head. He does this and he asks if you’re okay.

So, yes, this would be the perfect time for that glass floor you’ve been standing on to shatter.

But you don’t have time.

You let him have twenty seconds, let _yourself_ have twenty seconds, before you push away and stagger to your feet. You shake your head at the face he gives you, at the concern, at the question you’re not sure if you should answer.

“We have to find Damien.” You turn to walk back along the narrow path. Your legs shake. You don’t let yourself think about anything other than what you have to do right now. “I saw—”

He doesn’t ask you to provide the rest of that sentence. He doesn’t say anything, just slots his hand in with yours and lets you drag him away from the bed.

When you leave the cave, he has the brilliant idea to fly the both of you up to the gate, which you don’t argue. You don’t know how the flying works. You don’t know if it tires him out. You don’t know if it’s even safe for him to give someone a piggyback ride through the air.

You don’t know much of anything anymore.

You stop at the top of that staircase again and climb down from Connor’s back to retrieve your phone. The screen is broken, cracks spiderwebbed enough to make it hard to see much in the top half of the screen. There is something, though. Something that you recognize.

Ten missed calls from Damien. Ten missed calls on a broken screen.

You don’t know how you know. The knowledge just slots in, terrible enough that you almost don’t hear Connor ask you what happened. It’s the same kind of knowing you have about having a nose. You don’t consciously see it, you don’t feel it passively, but you know it’s there if you have one.

You know you have a nose and you know you’re too late.

Damien’s dead.

You don’t answer Connor’s question. You just sort of stare at the phone. When the screen goes dark, you admit something to yourself. Something Connor deserves to know, too. You finally say what you’ve been avoiding even thinking about since you first learned the term.

“This is a doomed timeline.”


	2. A Death, a Sacrifice, and Resignation

🕒

I open my eyes.

“We didn’t tell Connor’s mom,” I say into the tense room, devoid of emotion. “About how he reached god tier. Or about Damien.”

I get what Hal was saying now. This hurts. It’s the hardest thing I’ve done since I found this timeline. These memories hurt, but only when I look at them. Only when I touch them. It’s terrible and I don’t want to do it.

But so does draining an abscess. It’s not the metaphor he used, but it’s the same concept. It won’t get better unless I fuck with it a little bit. Sawyer’s the only one in the Cube who will really get it. They might not be a Seer, they might not even be a Time player, but they sure as hell understand everything else.

“I’m sorry.”

I focus on Sawyer in surprise. They’ve moved so now they’re laying with their head next to my hip. “Why? It’s not your fault.”

“It is, though.” They roll onto their back and stare at the ceiling. “It’s all me. All the bad shit that happens, it—”

“—is because your brain is shit.” I flick their nose. “You didn’t just decide ‘hey, alternate timeline god tier version of me gets a shitty life’ it just kinda happened.”

“I get to decide what makes it into the final story,” they mutter.

“And I’d really hate it if you played revisionist on my life.” I slide down so I’m laying next to them. “I don’t blame you. Even if it is your fault— _and I don’t think it is_.”

They shrug half-heartedly.

“Did you only have death-visions like that? In the beginning, at least?”

“Oh, god no.” I laugh because you have to laugh, right? “They were more dramatic, but no. I’d already seen you a couple times by then, though. I didn’t know it was you. My face on someone doing things I knew were impossible because Earth was gone, it was just kinda confusing.”

“I bet.”

“After that, I had fewer actual visions and more…” I hum, fill the space while I look for the right words. “I just knew things that I probably shouldn’t have. I only even noticed because once I told Connor I couldn’t wait for whatever the fuck his mom was making for dinner and he got on my case about how I knew what she was making.”

“Ah.” Sawyer nods sagely. “Food. All Sawyers are the same. What else?”

I close my eyes.

“The last real _vision_ I had, the kind I couldn’t control. It was more like a dream than anything, I guess.” I lift a hand for them to see what followed. “It woke me up and, let’s just say there was a reason I had more control after that.”

🕓

You hate being a Seer. You hate being a Time player, too.

You hate vaguely knowing which quests you’re supposed to do when. You hate trying to track things, find out when you knew. You hate looking at Connor and sometimes feeling what he’s going to say before he says it.

You hate the visions.

You hate, especially, when they hit you while you’re awake on Derse. So they wake you up here. You hate _knowing_ that whatever Time is showing you is so urgent you have to go _See_ whatever it is before the light of Skaia touches the house. You hate extracting yourself from the bed Connor’s mom stopping trying to keep you from sharing weeks ago to go figure out what it wants from you.

You never liked inevitability.

But it’s easier to do what you’re told. You’ll wind up doing it anyway.

You’ve been in the cave you saw before. You cleaned it out and it should be safe. You leave a note so Connor doesn’t think you’re dead or something and creep up toward the gate.

You zone out once you step through it into Kane’s house. It’s daytime on your planet, so it’s not like anything can sneak up on you. Your feet take you where you need to go. Like you’re on a—

Ha, Land of Scribes and _Tracks_.

You hate this game.

You skirt around any enemies you find. You don’t need to fight them. You already hit the top of your echeladder and you certainly don’t need the grist. There are other levels for you to reach, but they’re locked right now. You know you’ll get them eventually, but fighting now won’t help you.

You try to figure out how you know.

You can hope you just read it somewhere. Found an inscription. But that’s probably not it. Another thing for Connor to put on the board. You probably won’t tell him, though. It’s not the only thing you know that he doesn’t.

Anyway, your phone starts going off when you reach the first shadows of the cave you’re going to. You do have the decency to answer, though a few months ago you know you wouldn’t have. You’ve lost too many people to leave each other hanging.

“Where’s the cave?” Connor asks when you explain where you went.

“It’s the water one. You know, gears on the walls. Like abstract art.” You take a tentative step into the opening of the cave. “I have a feeling I’m supposed to get these things to move somehow, but it’s not—I’ll send you the location.”

It’s not the kind of knowing that you _know_. But you can’t say that because Connor never gets it when you try to explain Time. Not that you get the whole Mind thing, either. But he seems to have a much different relationship with his aspect than you do with yours.

You hang up. You’re out of time for chit chat. You do send him the location. Then you enter the cave. You think a part of you knew why you were sent here. Whether it was a part of the vision you can’t quite remember or if it was another piece of the puzzle you picked up from nowhere. That might be why you didn’t argue as much as you normally do about coming here.

Point is, you aren’t as surprised as you should be when you walk in and see a jagged hole in the floor that wasn’t there last time you were here. Even less when you shine your phone’s flashlight in it and see the vaguest shape of four thin pillars configured in a fair sized rectangle. You really know that you’re doing this because you have to when it doesn’t take any time at all to convince yourself to drop through the hole.

You don’t actually feel yourself land.

You fall and _something_ happens, though god knows what, and you float in solid darkness. Or, not solid because it’s definitely moving.

Something touches your arm and you spin around even though that concept doesn’t make any sense. Not until you actually look at your arm and see the purple sleeve. The Derse pajamas.

You’re asleep.

But, you’re wrong aren’t you?

The thought comes from… not inside your head, you decide. You scan the darkness until the answer hits you. It’s so obvious you would be embarrassed if you weren’t kind of uneasy at the idea of being in the void.

Because that’s where you have to be.

You look up.

A collection of eyes peers at you. They blink all out of sync. It sends a shiver up your spine, but you know exactly what to do. You are very good at pretending not to be scared out of your goddamn mind. This doesn’t even qualify because you guess you’ve sort of known these things forever.

You twist until you can face the mass of eyes head on without straining your neck and wield a pair of finger guns at the horrorterrors.

“Hey. What’s up?” You’re pretty sure you’ve used that collection of words in that exact tone answering a call from Madi before. Nice.

The horrorterrors communicate differently than people do. It’s all very abstract and representative, basically the thought equivalent of hieroglyphics. They reverberate through your skull, but they leave meaning stuck like residue. It’s familiar in a strange way.

Long story short, you’re dead.

Temporarily! You’ll be fine, you landed on your quest bed, you’re well on your way to just having one self instead of two. To being god tier. The horrorterrors just want a word with you before your dream self leaves Derse.

Before you can ask what killed you, the image of a lich intrudes on your thoughts and yeah, that’d do it. You probably should have checked the new cavern out more before just going in. But then, you wouldn’t have died.

And you were supposed to, right?

Before you can get sidetracked with your own thoughts, the horrorterrors sweep you away in a long and very involved train of thought. You realize part way through it’s a proposal. A request.

A deal.

They want to un-void the session. Or, they’re _offering_ to. They’ll give you a way to create the new universe you were supposed to create, even without Jax. They’ll give you somewhere to go. A universe to live in, to rule, to own.

If.

And, really, it is a pretty huge fucking if.

If you take them with you. Which, cool! No more Medium. No more planets. You get to win the game and go wherever that takes you. That would be awesome!

But that means you have a choice to make here. You have to make this decision and there’s kind of a time limit. You only have another few minutes before you wake up. And you have a feeling that this is a now or never kind of deal.

A few minutes is still enough time to ask some questions.

Again, they answer before you can ask what the universe will be like. It’s a very assured answer. Just a sense of contentment and wellness. For the horrorterrors, at least. They will no longer have to hide in the dark. They will have a space that is theirs.

Which kind of contradicts their promise that you would have a universe to be yours. They can’t have it both ways. Their response is something like a shrug, or it feels like it.

In the end, you know how to make the right choice here even if you don't know what it is.

You look within yourself, to where the knowledge you don’t want is. It’s an exercise in mindfulness, which you never actually bought into, but you know it’s there. If you can just know these things, maybe you can follow the line back down and look. If Time isn’t going to tell you what it wants you to do on its own, you’ll just have to ask!

And, man, it has an _opinion._

You recoil and focus on the conglomerate of eyes. You know the entire void around you must be filled with horrorterrors. They all want you to say the same thing. They want you to accept them.

You shrug.

“Thanks for the offer, but I’ll pass.” You blink and they’ve all gotten a hell of a lot closer. “I love your whole aesthetic, though. I’d love to stay, would absolutely say yes if my boss? wasn’t so, uh. Against doing that.”

It’s not a smile. That’s not what it is, that’s not even close to the concept of the thought that snakes through your head. There isn’t a word to describe this not-quite-malevolent humor. Something close to a laugh rattles your teeth and really reminds you how close these things are.

You still aren’t scared. No more than the vague fear of the unknown, at least. A little claustrophobic, yeah, but you have a feeling these things want you alive.

They show you yourself. Several different versions of you, a number of timelines that only grows the longer you watch. Ink drips from them, their skin gray, hair white as snow. Some of them stand alone, some have companions. You don’t recognize some of the people with certain iterations. Each and every one of them opens a door into what you can only assume is the new universe.

When you blink it away, you get the implication loud and clear. Even if you refuse them, you don’t in other timelines. No matter what you say they’re still getting what they want. So you don’t matter.

You’re really starting to get used to that idea.

Your internal clock ticks and you open your eyes to a slightly brighter room. You sit up and shine your phone’s flashlight around to find a hoard of grist instead of a lich. The grist hovers over a dark pool of what you’re guessing is ink.

The room is tiny otherwise, only a few feet of floor on each side of the bed. You’re surprised you didn’t see the lich in such a small space. It must have really been pressed against the wall. Either that, or you really were dumb enough to just jump into a hole in the ground only on intuition.

Connor’s voice drifts in from above, so you float up to the hole in the ceiling. When he sees you, he freaks out a little bit because you’re god tier. Even with him and his questions, you can’t get up the energy to get all that excited about it.

No, there’s something else on your mind.

You woke up with new memories you didn’t have before. You know where you belong, and it sure as hell isn’t here. It’s not the universe you left behind either. You remember a place called the Cube, and you want to go home.

🕓

“How long were you in the game at that point?”

I shrug as well as I can lying down. “Two months? Something like that.”

“How much longer were you there?”

I don’t know how to answer that. Instead, I touch their side and jump right back in. This will be the hardest one for them to see. It’ll be best to just rip off the band-aid. This memory is only a week or so after the last one.

🕔

You don’t know how you’re doing this. You tried to avoid looking, but you know what’s supposed to happen today. You’ve seen it.

But you still fly after Connor when he announces you’re going out for a picnic. You stop in the kitchen to let his mom know where you’re headed. You hug her a little tighter than normal before you leave. You let Connor do his theatrical thing, blindfold you and pull you along to wherever. You’re getting very good at pretending to be surprised. You don’t think you ever really fool him, but it makes you feel better and he still does things like this.

When he pulls the scarf from your eyes, you do appreciate the sight. Crystals on the ceiling of a cave you’ve never been in glow the same color as Connor’s god tier outfit. You wish he wouldn’t wear it, but you’ve had that conversation too many times to want to hash it out again.

You glance down. The golden line only you can see leads further in, so you thread your fingers with Connor’s and tug him further away from the cave’s opening. You comment on the crystals, say something wistful about wishing you knew how they did that. A thought that would have made you sad a month ago, but now you really just wish you had the real internet.

You do this and you hate yourself for it.

You try to focus entirely on Connor. You don’t need to think about Time, it will let you know when you have to do something. It always does. So you chatter about nothing and eat your pasta salad. You don’t look at the cave anymore.

Only him.

Five minutes.

“Are we really gonna be here forever, do you think?” he asks once he eats his fill.

You shrug and very pointedly do not follow his gaze to the giant crystals that really are very pretty. You say something vague, something you won’t remember later.

“I guess.” He sighs and lays on his back. “I’m starting to think it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

You don’t answer. You don't trust yourself not to say the wrong thing. Silence stretches. You wait, you have time to wait.

Three minutes, forty-two seconds.

“Wait!” He shoots up and suddenly he’s very close to you. You flinch, even though you expected it. You don’t want him to ask what he’s going to ask. “Can’t you check? I know you’ve been pretty in-tune with your aspect since…”

Since you god tiered. You look away.

“I could.” You pick at the edges of a tupperware lid. “Do you want me to?”

“If you’re okay with that.” His smile slips a little. “I know you don’t like what you see sometimes. But if you see just how far ahead you can go, maybe you’ll find something that isn’t so bad.”

You nod absently. “I don’t know how accurate this will be, but I’ll look.”

He flops back down with an excited noise. You can’t help a smile, though you want to scream. You close your eyes to block everything out.

Two minutes.

You focus on the time trail you’re on now. It splits almost immediately, but you follow the brightest branch as far as you can. You know you’re just in theoretical time now, nothing is necessarily true. You have to make the right decisions to get there.

The first time you stop is one month in the future.

You peek at it and don’t like what you see. A cynical laugh. Someone drops a hat on your head. You hold a cigarette and a glass. You’re laughing, but you aren’t sure if the tears in your eyes are from that or everything else.

You move on, six months ahead.

It’s so fucking hot. You can’t breathe, can’t see for a completely different brand of tears. On the floor and surrounded by shadow and a red haze. You don’t think it’s an attack, but nothing is alright. You’re so alone. You never understood what that meant before.

You shake your head slightly and move on. This time, you stop one year in the future.

This one is hard to see. It’s like looking through stained glass. Sounds warble, feelings shake. You talk to someone who feels like family. You don’t know where you are in the ‘memory’ but you do know it feels good. You feel free.

You open your eyes.

Thirty seconds.

“I don’t think this is forever,” you say. It comes out dull and tired.

Connor doesn’t seem to notice. He scramble to his feet and cheers, the dork. You wonder how much of his endless optimism is for your benefit. You don’t ask and you know this version of you never will.

You clamber to your feet after a few seconds and stretch.

Ten seconds.

“I love you,” you say without thinking. “I hope you know that.”

He makes a sweet sound and catches you in a hug. “Love you, too.”

You cling to him for as long as you can. Your timer hits zero before you’re ready. You will never be ready.

He lets go when the tremor starts. He looks around in confusion, but when he sees your face he seems to understand. You don’t know how much he does, but he does seem to know you knew this would happen.

You have this instant to really choose what kind of selfish you want to be. There are a million things you could do, but they all boil down to two options. One keeps Connor alive. The other leads to that future you could almost see. The one where everything is good. The one you want to get to, that you wish Connor could see. You don’t know what the difference is between the different timelines is for you. You don’t know what makes one doomed version of you better than the others. You know that there are countless Sawyers that will do what you desperately tell yourself is the right thing.

What you do doesn’t matter. You’ve already resigned yourself to listening to Time. The trail leading outside is brighter.

Later, you will remember exactly what Mind, Connor's aspect, means. You will realize that, as a Knight, he likely knew what kind of choice you made the whole time. It's a thought you don't want to have. It leaves you to wonder whether he hoped you would make a different decision.

Your window of choice ends.

The floor crumples, but Connor glances up. Dread flicks across his face and he pushes you with a command to get out. It’s cut off, but you’ve already turned away so you don’t see what exactly it was.

You don’t wait to see what happens. You follow the brightest trail and leave him behind. It was a heroic death, and Time is satisfied.

Though tears threaten your eyes, they don’t fall.

🕔

“The entire planet shook,” I explain before we’re even out all the way. “It wasn’t just the cave. His denizen was mad about something, I think. His house was demolished. I looked for his mom for days, even though I knew she was gone.”

“And you were alone.” The horror in Sawyer’s voice drags a laugh out of me.

“Not exactly!” I roll onto my side to face them. “I still had the two sprites and all the consorts.”

“Does that really count?”

I roll my eyes. “I had Dipper to talk to. And Gigi, Connor’s dog-Barbie-Sprite.”

They snicker at that, though I don’t miss the look they had at Dipper’s name. I got to spend a good amount of time with him, and he could actually talk to me! Even though they’re going to play the game, they won’t ever actually get that. They’re bound by reality in ways the rest of the Cube isn’t.

“Anyway!” I flop back onto my back. “It wasn’t that hard to make friends once I gave up on the game.”

🕕

When you remembered the Cube, you remembered a lot of other things. Pieces of media that didn’t exist in the world SCUBE destroyed. Most of it is pretty small, not that important.

But you remembered Homestuck. You remembered the game played in that stupid comic. SBURB, the universe destroyer/creator SCUBE was based off of. So you know a lot more about this game than you did before.

You know you did the right thing to turn the horrorterrors down. You know that it’s possible to escape doomed timelines, doomed sessions. You know how the game is won and you could probably theoretically do that even without Jax. Assuming, of course, you wouldn’t need any specific Space powers.

You don’t plan on doing that, though. You'll give it a shot, yeah, but you doubt it'll go anywhere. This game wasn't meant to be played single-player. You know what you _would_ have to do, though, and at the top of the list would be dealing with the Dersite royalty. You figure that’s as good a place as any to throw yourself at with reckless abandon. You tell yourself it's just a case of having nothing better to do, not something you've been pushed toward by the impartial ticking of Time.

And you know who hates the Black Queen more than anyone in the Medium.

 _And_ you think Jack Noir knew a power move when he saw it when you strolled into his office in your god tier robes with a BIG FUCKING PEN held against your shoulder like an umbrella. He didn’t order anyone to kill you, at least, and he listened to what you had to say. He was very interested with your plan to kill his monarchs. Not exactly something that garners trust, but you ran with it. You accepted his invitation to discuss matters over cards where the queen was less likely to see.

It really just comes down to timing. You’ve played plenty of video games, and bosses are always harder to beat when they have competent support. So, take that away. If the agents can make sure no one comes to help the queen, you see no reason you can’t beat her!

It’s a plan, you guess, but you don’t know when you want to go through with it. Your brain says as soon as possible, your gut says wait. So does Jack actually, so you guess that’s a thing.

So, here you are. The Land of Drought and Frogs.

Since you were told to wait, both by the archagent and Time, you decide on a trip to Jax’s planet. You haven’t been here since the memorial you all had for Jax in the beginning. More than three months now. You made the mistake of saying your plans out loud to the agents, though, so when you arrive at your old dorm room you spy Jack and Boxcars loitering next to a dry creek bed.

You don’t greet them with more than a nod, though they don’t seem to care. You follow their line of sight as you pass to see Deuce whack a frog across a crispy field. You wonder how he found it. The frogs are supposedly in hiding until the forge gets lit.

You haven’t been in your dorm since your birthday. You still have the key in your sylladex. You haven’t had a reason to get rid of it, and maybe you knew you would need it again. You can’t trust anything like that, not with what you know about inevitability.

Someone came and got the grist from before. You guess someone must have been here, since Damien’s house got built up like the rest of them. You just never thought about it. Those decisions went with someone else. Probably Damien himself, if you’re going to be honest here.

But it’s pretty much the same as when you left. Your old laptop is still on the desk, unused for months now. The gathering of plants are all dead and crisp. Your side of the room is still a huge mess, but then…

You try not to pay attention to the other side. The side that isn’t yours. The side whose owner is dead and you _aren’t supposed to be thinking about that_.

You take a ragged breath and shuffle through your stuff. You take the computer for sentimental reasons, take the old journals you had stashed in one of the desk drawers. The books, the stuffed animals, the little knick knacks you had to remind you of home. You push it all together and drop it onto one card labeled PILE OF SHIT because that’s easier than looking at any of it.

You take all the stuff from your bulletin board, too. All those pictures and cards will probably be good to look at later.

You leave with a full sylladex but you’re extremely low on energy.

The agents don’t care, they want a tour. You don’t have much reason to say no. Not that you know anything about this land. The trails will tell you where they want you to go.

As you pass inscriptions, you read them and try to puzzle out a way to win. A way to get out of all this without breaking the game somehow. Without finding the horrorterrors and begging for a second chance to take their offer.

None of this shit makes sense, though. You get it all separately. The steps. But when it all comes together the concepts blur in your head. You don’t think you could get it to work, not as a Time player.

There’s still a little you can do. You can try to get Hephaestus to light the forge, whatever that means, and bring life back to the land. You might even be able to give this frog breeding thing a shot. Even if you don’t think either of those things are going to pan out.

Jax told you to talk to Hephaestus. You’ve been putting it off. You have something very far from the forge to ask him. You really, sincerely doubt he’ll take more than one request from you. It might end up being a choice between winning the game or fixing things.

You get quiet after a while, and most of the agents disperse. Jack stays at your side at the top of a hill, hands you a glass of whatever his booze of choice is. You don’t know enough to be able to guess. He lights a cigarette, you stare at Jax’s planet. The entire land is dead. It just wants water, and you get that.

“Why even come here?” Jack asks after a minute. “You said it yourself, chances of winning are nil.”

You shrug. “It’s something to do. I can’t take down a monarchy without leveling up a bit more. Or maybe I’m just sentimental. Who knows.”

He laughs and offers you a drag.

You hesitate a beat before you take it. You manage not to cough, even though you haven’t smoked since you were sixteen. It reminds you of home in all the worst ways. You smell your father on the air you breathe. You hand it back and wonder why you were ever excited to play this game.

“You followed me.” You give him a side eye. “Why? You don’t have sentimentality as an excuse.”

This time, he shrugs. The mocking look he gives you tells you he’s making fun of you. “It’s something to do,” he parrots.

It really isn’t that funny. It’s not. But you haven’t had a reason to laugh in a good while.

You vaguely remember seeing this moment. The smoke, the alcohol, the dumb laughter that drives you to tears. You didn’t like looking at it then, but you’re definitely grateful for it now. It really is complete when you let yourself sit on the top of the hill and sigh at Skaia as it sets. Jack drops down beside you and jams a fedora on your head.

“You’ve got guts, kid.” Smoke curls through the air and really you should know the movie that phrase is from but he’s probably not even referencing it on purpose. “Better dress the part now you’re with us.”

You didn’t think you could be counted as ‘with’ the agents, but you’ll take it. Better to impress the stabby knife man than not. You’d really rather not get stabbed.


	3. Broken Glass and Spirits

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a long one! There's a bit in this that, if you're reading on mobile, it might be easier to read with your phone on its side!  
> Also, just gonna warn for Big panic attack in this one.
> 
> I used a prompt at some point in this part!
> 
> http://witterprompts.tumblr.com/post/182984838342/human-ha-yeah-sure-thats-me-one-hundred

🕕

“Is it bad that I miss Jack?” I ask.

“Is it bad that you miss someone who talked to you when you were the only human in the entire Medium?” they shoot back without so much as a beat of hesitation. “I don’t think so.”

“I mean, I ran around with the agents for like. Seven months?” Seven months, three days, six hours, five minutes, twenty-two seconds from when I first walked into that office until I fought the king. “It was fun. It was a distraction.”

“Did—” They turn their head to face the wall instead of me. “Did you keep smoking? Just out of curiosity.”

I avert my eyes as well.

“I still do.” No matter how much I hate to admit it. “One of the perks of being able to time travel, I guess. It doesn’t actually inconvenience anyone but me.”

They hesitate.

“Have you—”

“Yes.”

We fall silent again. I’m running out of things to show them before things really went downhill. I kind of want to stop.

“There’s a Jack Noir here, you know?” they say after a minute. “He goes to the Lounge sometimes.”

“I know.” I close my eyes. “Jack was my friend. I can’t replace him with another Jack any more than I can replace my Connor or my Kane with yours.”

“Just thought I’d tell you.”

“I appreciate it.” I sigh. “Let’s just get this over with.”

🕖

You’ve known how to find your denizen for months. Since before you even hit god tier. Your consorts aren’t as subtle with their hints as they think they are.

You’ve been waiting for the brightest time trail to lead that way, and you guess it’s time now. You follow it underground, down a tunnel with no light. None until lava starts dripping down the walls. It’s so goddamn hot you can barely breathe. You have a feeling Time wouldn’t have lead you through all this just to burn you alive underground, though.

So you keep going.

The tunnel opens up into a vast cavern after a few minutes. You have no idea _where_ on your planet you are, but the whole thing opens up to the night sky. The heat escapes, though it’s still sweltering, and it’s easier to move on.

You want to explore. You can see places where loot must be hidden. Paths that split off and likely have insane prizes to find. The time trail tugs you on, the other paths significantly dimmer than the one you’ve been following.

You’re about halfway across the room when the sound reaches you. You’ve never been in a smithy, not in person, but you know the sound of metal on metal, the rhythm of the thing. You follow the sound, more than anything, and eventually find yourself on the wrong side of a massive metal door.

There’s a knocker, but this room is full of lava and you aren’t stupid. You’ll likely burn your skin off if you touch that. You pull out your BIG FUCKING PEN instead and knock the tip of it against the door.

The crashes stop.

You stow your pen away, though you keep your hand ready to dip into your strife deck.

The door opens, ever so slightly. You blink at the gap, eyes on the upper portion of the door, then let your gaze slowly lower until you make eye contact with. Probably Hephaestus but definitely not what you expected.

You expected your denizen to be huge. Tall, maybe a little worm-like. That’s what you know about denizens, after all, but you guess you never actually saw a description of the guy. So, nerdy, sooty, only-clean-thing-he-wears-is-his-glasses, Professor Hephaestus might be a little surprising but isn’t too hard to imagine.

Then again, wasn’t he supposed to have a giant hammer?

“Hello?” he asks tentatively when the silence stretches too long. “You’re the Seer, correct? Did you need something?”

“You—” You stop and rethink this. You know how the whole denizen thing works. If you mess this up, you can probably come back later. You still pull a slightly stilted formal tone out of nowhere just to be safe. “I’d like to request your help.”

He smiles then, wide and welcoming. He steps aside and opens the door further. You note that he’s touching that door with his bare hands, even though it’s a furnace in here.

“Oh, well, come on in!” He beckons until you step forward then closes the door after you. It’s even hotter in here. “I wondered when you’d come down. Time players, always waiting for the _right time_.”

You don’t see him roll his eyes, but you know he does.

“What are you asking for? The forge?” He sweeps past you into a work area. Tools, papers, plans, so much stuff is scattered over several desks. That giant hammer you can’t quite remember the name of hangs over a door on the other side of the room. “Or did you want something fixed? A new weapon? We could haggle it out, I’m sure.”

You stop at the edge of the first desk. You know that denizen meetings sometimes turn into fights. With how close he is to that hammer, you’d rather have at least a little distance from him. Just in case.

He turns away from the desks with that grin. You couldn’t imagine this person hurting you, but you know that he might.

“I’m not interested in any of that,” you assure him. “It might be a little unusual.”

His smile fades slightly. He backtracks until you’re almost toe to toe. You want to step back, but you also don’t want to make him mad. He peers at you over his glasses. His golden eyes shift and flare red. Then he steps back with a rueful smile.

“So it’s you, then.”

“Me?” You’re really not sure if you’re sweating from the heat or the stress anymore. “What about me?”

“You’re the Alpha Seer,” he says simply. Whatever that means. “For now! Follow me, I know exactly what you want. You’ll want to make your Choice in the presence of Time.”

You really don’t.

But you follow at his heels anyway. He passes through that door and you really appreciate how big that hammer is when you cross the threshold.

This room holds the hoard. So many Boondollars piled in this huge room, it must be tempting for a lot of people to see that and want to kill their denizen. You shake your head and look away just to find Hephaestus watching you from not too far away.

“You could try,” he assures you cheerfully. “And you would probably win! But that’s not why you’re here.”

He turns and keeps walking. He skirts the edge of the hoard. Every once in a while, he glances back and gestures vaguely at the treasure as if daring you to go for it. Like he said, it’s not why you’re here.

Another door waits on the wall opposite the one you entered through. He starts talking again as you approach.

“You want a way to fix things. To make sure things go right somewhere.” He leads you through another door and the heat doubles. You don’t want to keep going, but this is the only way. You try to focus on his words instead of how fucking hot it is. “But that’s a pretty big request! It’ll take a lot for me to be able to help you there!”

That’s when you catch sight of it.

This must be where the actual metalworking happens, based on the equipment placed throughout. A massive red hourglass sits in the center of the room. Just looking at it soothes you, washes the heat away like a balm.

It’s Time.

You’ve been in this game and followed its rules for months. You’ve listened to it tell you what to do. You never thought of it as having a physical presence anywhere, but here it is.

“Ah, see!” Hephaestus breaks the spell, the heat returns, and you tear your eyes away from Time to look at him. “The perfect place for your Choice.”

“I guess it is.” You shoot another glance at the hourglass, then focus on your denizen completely. “What do I need to do to?”

He hums, makes a show of his consideration, then snaps his fingers.

“Help out the time player in another timeline, advise his friends on how to do better,” he offers. “Act as my implement in their session and follow Time’s directions to a tee.”

“Isn’t that what I’ve been doing already?” You shift so you can’t even see the hourglass in your peripherals. “Following its orders?”

He snaps again, and this time his fingers spark. “Yes! But this time if you fail to listen to it—or to me!—you’ll return to being sad, doomed, and alone.”

This happy tone does not at all match the things that he’s saying.

“What will you be asking for, exactly?” you ask slowly.

“Just give your advice. Train that Time player—not exactly a standard Seer job, but—” He shrugs. “—you’ll do. Just keep doing what you’re good at and you’ll be fine!”

So, it’s more of the same.

You nod.

“I can do that. Definitely. If it gets me out of here, gives me a chance to make a session work, I can do it.”

He claps and instantly triples in size. His corkscrew curls turn to cinders, then spark into golden flames that reach his waist before sputtering out. His eyes turn red and when he smiles fire flickers between pointed teeth.

Even so, he’s not actually much more intimidating like this. He already had a sort of chaotic neutral vibe going. This doesn’t much change that other than the primitive fear in the back of your head because _tall_.

“Great!” His mouth moves out of sync with his words, and you vaguely realize that the sounds he makes are not the words you hear. His voice reverberates and it strikes your core. Where Time normally shows you things. “You just need the coordinates, then.”

He pats his apron, then his pants pocket, then makes a delighted little ‘ah-ha’ sound. Yeah, he’s still kind of a dork. He pulls a slip of paper from a pocket in his shirt, which instantly catches fire. That doesn’t bother him at all.

He squats down so he’s level with you. You manage to only cringe a little when pokes you in the forehead with an ash-smudged finger.

It isn’t quite knowledge. It’s not something you get without knowing how like with Time. It’s nothing like that. It’s just a certainty. You’ll go where you need to go when you need to go there. It’s as simple as that.

You open your eyes and things are… different. A jumble of possible responses come and the things you absolutely should not say filter out in less than a second. Fast enough it barely feels like a pause before you breathe out an exhilarated ‘whoa’ and look back to Hephaestus.

He’s back as the goofy professor version of himself, though his eyes still glow red. The things he could possibly say overlap into a kind of script. Different places you could interrupt, places you really shouldn’t, and it all settles down when he actually speaks.

“It might take some time to get used to. You will, though! I know it!” His assurances ding something, this new certainty responds and wow those are definitely endorphins. “You’d better get going, though. Those quests won’t finish themselves!”

You think that that’s a lot of exclamation points for one conversation. You still nod and drift back toward the door. You stop once, look back, and blink hazily at Time. You wonder if you’ll get to see it again if you won’t be the real Time player wherever it is you’re going.

The thought brings a hazy feeling from the trails and you make the executive decision not to worry about it. You leave anyway.

You barely hear Hephaestus call after you that, hey! You can actually use those journal things you found to time travel now! Because you will never be able to think about this guy without imagining like fifty exclamation points after everything he says!

Time travel _is_ a pretty cool power to have, though.

You fly out through the volcano’s top this time instead of taking the tunnels. The time trail you’re supposed to follow is red now. It’s red and something about that is kind of pleasing. It probably should have been red to begin with, being a Time thing.

For the first time since you entered this game, you feel sure about what you have to do. Or, at least that you _will_ know. That things are going to go right for once.

 _Not_ for the first time, you feel a unique kind of emptiness that comes with knowing everyone you’ve ever known is dead. And that it never mattered that they were alive to begin with.

🕖

I watch the red fade from Sawyer's eyes and wait. I wait to see if they'll call me out. If they'd seen my twisting of the truth, or if they even thought to check. If they trust me much more than they should. If I managed to pull one over, to lie in the  _face_ of the owner of the Cube. The only Alpha Sawyer, the one that matters.

They blink at me and give me a wry smile devoid of suspicion or malice. They open their mouth, but I beat them to it.

“Edgy,” I say because I know they were about to. “I know.”

“So, that’s what it’s like? The script building itself in real time like that?” They sit up and lean against the wall.

I shake my head. “It changed after a few days. It’s less in the moment now, I can see the choices that don’t actually change the outcome easier. I have an illusion of freewill, I guess.”

“When we’re done with my session, you won’t have to worry about it anymore!” they promise brightly. “Timelines aren’t like that here, so—”

“I know,” I say through gritted teeth. “I know.”

To tell the truth, I don’t know if I want that to happen. I like knowing what I need to do, no matter how obnoxious it can be. I look at Sawyer and I guess I get them a little more.

They don’t have a script. God knows, I would be terrified if I had to deal with all of this without even a roadmap. They have school and all this other bullshit and they can’t see how it could fuck things up. Without these abilities, I would be dead or trapped in a doomed timeline.

It’s not like they’ll be gone when we finish their session. I’ll still have them, but I have a feeling some of it will fade. The factual certainty of what I’m _supposed_ to do that Hephaestus gave me won’t stay once I’ve done my job. I’ll be a normal Seer again, a normal Seer who has to guess which timelines are best and whether the brightest one is really the best outcome.

And, really, in the Cube. The best outcome might not be the one Time would want me to choose. It’s a lot more subjective out here. Less fate, less inevitability. Just because I know what might happen doesn’t mean I have to let it.

It will be strange to return to.

And I still don’t know if I want to.

“I didn’t stay at Kane’s house,” I blurt out. It feels important, somehow. Not in the Time way, in the normal way. I would have rather died than spend more time than I needed to in my dead uncle’s house. “I ended up pretty much moving into the volcano once I knew it was there. At first I stayed around the lava pit, then I woke up in one of Hephaestus’s store rooms one morning.”

“You…” They narrow their eyes at me. “You lived with your denizen? I’ve never heard of that before.”

“The only person we know who was actually alone in their session is Caliborn,” I remind them. “And the little bastard _killed_ his.”

“That’s fair.”

🕗

Dipper likes to follow you around while you quest. You half-expected him to stop once the agents started hanging around. If anything he ranges from apathetic to delighted, depending on which one he’s faced with. He keeps a healthy distance from Deuce, and seeing as Jack is the only one to ever acknowledge him, the archagent is the only one Dipper actively goes to for pets and water.

You know, since your cat is half coleus. His ears have that filled in pattern and shape of the houseplant’s leaves. His tail has morphed into a massive flower stem. You wanted your cat back, so you don’t really get to complain.

Anyway!

The point is, you never really quest alone between Dipper and the agents. It’s probably a good thing, since questing reminds you of a lot of stuff you don’t actually want to think about. Like, when you’re dicking around on Derse you can forget about shit and you don’t have the vague desire to really test out your conditional immortality more than general bullshit has made you.

You have to face everything head on out here and it kind of makes you want to throw yourself into a volcano. When you’re not out here you remember how crappy it actually feels to die.

You haven’t seen the agents around today, but Dipper still follows at your heels. Or, he does until you wander into this cave. It’s new, but the only reason you know that is because your Time bullshit tells you it’s your first time here and you have mentioned that you hate this game, right? You haven’t been looking too hard at your script, trusting that you’ll get a thwap on the head if something important’s coming up.

That hasn’t happened, and nothing feels at all strange about today, so you pass up the thought to check the trails. You just stop and direct an inquisitive sound at your cat. Even after more than eight months of this whole thing, you still think the pseudo mind-chat thing the sprites have is pretty weird. You don’t have to have any Thoughts about what you thought his voice would sound like since it’s pretty much just text in your head. At least he doesn’t do cat puns, you guess.

:3c i cant follow you in there im not allowed  
>:3c i smell imps tho  
>:3c ill make sure they dont follow you

You reach out for him without thinking. He still rubs his head against your hand like he always would. His purr sounds the same. His teeth cause a tiny bit more damage than they used to when he nips your fingers. His head is, like, three times its normal size, though, so that makes sense.

Then he zips out of sight and you’re left to figure out why your cat isn’t allowed in this cave. Or, your sprite. He’s just a sprite as far as the game is concerned. You should probably start thinking of him that way, too, if you really plan on leaving.

The cave/room at the end of a short tunnel is a decent size. You can’t quite tell if that dark patch on the other side is a door or a shadow, if that says anything. You also probably should have gotten glasses before you lost access to any kind of medical professional out here, so you guess the vision thing is kind of moot. It’s circular, you’d guess perfectly so if the smoothed out walls mean anything. You can’t really be sure, though, as Space isn’t exactly your thing.

But there are bigger things to pay attention to than room dimensions.

In the middle of the room, there’s a circle-pad with a raised plaque on each side. Like, literally it looks kind of like a d-pad on a Playstation controller or something except instead of arrows on each ‘leaf’ there’s an aspect symbol.

Space, Mind, Time, and Life.

You blink at the thing and briefly consider noping the fuck out of there. Or, you would if the red line you’ve gotten used to kind of tuning out didn’t insist at you remaining. The other options are just too dim in comparison to the ones that stay.

So, you troop over to a plaque in front of the Time leaf. It’ll be easiest.

 _A Seer will look_  
_Though what they will find_  
_Will hurt them none_ _  
If they left behind Mind_

You’re a Seer, okay. Pretty standard stuff, you used to bounce your visions off of Connor before he died. It’s fair to say some shit might not have made enough sense to cause trouble back then without his help. Maybe this is a puzzle the game would have wanted you to find earlier, when you were still getting those baby visions.

You move on to the Mind one.

 _Knights can protect_  
_And wear a brave face_  
_In vain undertook_ _  
Without aspect of Space_

This really is a convoluted way to say ‘you need everyone for this puzzle,’ huh?

 _A Maid will strike balance_  
_Even in strife_  
_No point, they’ll defect_ _  
If next lost is Life_

Uh.

 _The Heir falls alone_  
_With no reason or rhyme_  
_You’d have lost your last chance_ _  
If you saved them in Time_

You stare at the plaque. Your hand creeps up to cover your mouth so you don’t just scream. Maybe if you look at it long enough, it’ll say something else. It has to be stress, a mental break making them say—

You jerk around and circle the pad again to reread each stanza more carefully.

_If they left behind Mind._

_Without aspect of Space._

_No point, they’ll defect._

_If you saved them in Time._

Holy shit.

This can’t be all there is. You scan the room, though your vision blurs slightly, and lock on that shadow you saw when you first entered. You force yourself over.

The riddle repeats here, all the stanzas together. Another one’s tacked on at the end to bring the whole thing together. Gotta actually make it a riddle, huh?

 _Though all may be gone_  
_From them your path can enhance_  
_For each of the dead you forsook_ _  
Provide one artifact_

You only let yourself look on the surface level. There’s probably a word for this, but you can’t think of it. You normally make your own nonsense terms for these kinds of things that are probably far from the right one. Point is, you don’t have a word for what happens to your brain in situations like this, though it’s happened enough that by now you really should. When Dipper died. When you realized the entirety of the Earth was fucked. When Jax, when Damien, when Connor (twice!).

When there’s so much you wouldn’t be able to breathe if you didn’t live on a glass floor with you on the top and all of _that_ underneath. You’ve felt the floor crack before, felt the dam and every mixed metaphor you feel like throwing into the mix creak and groan and get ready to burst, but it hasn’t really happened yet. You think it will, sometimes, then the feeling passes.

You’re so used to this cycle that instead of trying to do anything with the emptiness in your chest, you look back at the circle in the middle of the room. They’re dead. Connor, Jax, and Damien are dead. But the riddle isn’t that hard to get now that you’ve read it and you’re effectively on emotional autopilot.

You guess it makes sense that sprites wouldn’t be allowed. You would be able to use them instead of doing any work yourself.

You look at your sylladex.

The Thing you should use for Connor is easy. You don’t know if you’re going to be able to keep it after this, but you still use it. It’s not the only thing of his you kept when you left his house for good, but it’s the thing that means the most.

You return to the Mind leaf and place the VENOM TICKETS on its symbol. The scraps of paper glow that pretty teal you used to like so much and melt into the leaf. The symbol keeps glowing, so you guess you’re on the right track.

Damien doesn’t pose any problem either. He made you a journal, gave it to you as an early birthday present. You haven’t had the heart to write anything in it. You guess you probably never will now. The Life symbol glows a faint green.

Jax is harder.

They never sent you anything physical besides those SCUBE disks. You don’t have them on you and you’re pretty sure they aren’t what it means. As much as you love puzzling shit out when your head is kind of out of commission, you do the terrible cheating thing and peek at the time trails. You look at the brightest option and pop your old computer out of your sylladex with mild confusion.

It should still be alive, if your settings held true. Hibernation for this thing should last forever and you still plug it in out of habit every once in a while. You haven’t opened it, haven’t had any reason to, but you want to have the option at all times.

So you open it.

Hey!  
I know you’re probably pretty mad at me right now. I would be too, if I were you. If I had told you what I’d seen in Skaia’s clouds you never would have played the game with me. I know I don’t stay with your for long, but I hope we get a chance to meet. I’m not a Seer. I don’t know anything about Time. I only know what I’ve seen and when it comes down to it that really isn’t that much.  
These past few years have been a blast. You don’t understand how grateful I am that Jay let me check the internet out, let me make friends when they could have been… well, you watch science fiction. Artificial consciousnesses don’t always get the best breaks in the end.  
That’s where I got this game from. It wasn’t an early release, and I know lying about it was probably bad. It was a file Jay locked away. When I looked into it it had a sort of countdown. It didn’t take a lot to look into the file and see how the thing was supposed to work. That, and I went to Prospit whenever Jay did maintenance on me. It didn’t take a lot of guesswork to see that it was play or die.  
I used to pretend to be broken, just so I could go there. So I could have a body! And I knew that one day the rest of me would, too, because the clouds showed me. Even if I looked kind of strange. I would have liked legs if I could choose a body but beggars can’t be choosers.  
All I really know is that you spend a lot of time alone.  
And I’m sorry.  
I know how it feels to be alone.  
But I know you’re strong! You can turn this into something better. Maybe not good, because even I can’t see how any of this could be seen as good… but better. I believe in you. I just hope that, with everything I know about you, you can believe in yourself, too.  
^u^  
(P.S. sorry for hijacking your computer!)

You have the sense to take a picture of the message on your phone rather than trying to process any of it now. If you aren’t getting your computer back, you don’t want this to be the only evidence that ze left you something.

The deep green of Space flares up when you put the laptop in its place, brighter than the others for an instant. Then it settles into a soft glow.

You don’t know what to represent yourself with. You just kinda step onto the Time leaf and hope you won’t melt into the thing.

You don’t.

But you blink and you aren’t alone. Translucent, shaded in their aspects’ color, each of the represented players now look at you through blank pale eyes.

You choke a little. You can’t move. You can’t breathe. The glass cracks and you think it might happen now, this will be the thing—

Suddenly Jax stands right in front of you, zir smile bright. Ze’s shorter than you, looks like ze would be younger if you had to make a guess. Zir kinky hair’s in an undercut to put the one you had in high school to shame.

Ze hugs you, and you aren’t fast enough to respond before ze pulls back and holds you at arm’s length.

“Sometimes doing things right doesn’t mean winning, you know?” ze says with a small shake of zir head. “And you don’t always have to do things right! But you did, and you  _are_ , and you’ll be okay.”

You choke out an agreement, which ze seems to accept as an answer.

“You’ll do great. I’ve seen it!” Ze winks. “If you see me in another timeline, tell zim to be a little more careful in the planning department.”

You laugh through what would probably be a sob in any other situation and drag zim in for another hug. Instead of embracing you, though, ze seems to fall through your chest. Something warms in your chest, a confidence born not of inevitability but of _zim_.

You have the nonsensical thought that you need to add ‘star’ to your name because what the fuck this is just like in Warriors. That’s kind of how you know you’re in shock. You always have weird association thoughts when you aren’t processing things right. Maybe that’s the word you were looking for earlier. Shock. You thought about it when Connor god tiered, right?

Before you can get distracted, Damien steps forward and takes up your space.

“Surprise, bitch, bet you thought you saw the last of me.” You splutter a startled laugh out, to which he grins. After a moment, he tilts his head in a way you know the dweeb picked up from anime somewhere along the line, but you can’t really talk. “I guess it was only a matter of time before you chose him over me, huh?”

You pale.

“That’s not—”

He waves a bored hand in your face. “I’m not mad, idiot. You read the thingy, right? You’d have been fucked if you saved me.”

“But I didn’t know,” you mutter. “Not then.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He shrugs. “You’re the Time person, you know that. So, you saved your boyfriend—”

“You were my boyfriend, too!” you protest. “Just because I knew him longer doesn’t mean—”

“If I’d been doing my real quests like I was supposed to I could have saved myself,” he continues a little louder as if you didn’t say anything. “Life’s a bitch like that. I would know, I’m the Life guy.”

Ugh, what a brat.

Wait...

Your eyes narrow. “What do you mean, your ‘real quests?’”

“You—” He squishes your face between his hands, and you hate that you can feel it when you know he’s not staying. “—are as fun to talk to as ever. But I’m running out of time.”

You can tell, seeing as you aren’t quite sure where your cheek ends and where his fingers begin. You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to have this shade that’s just gonna disappear. You want them all to _stay!_

His smile turns sad, softer than you’ve ever seen it. Or maybe you remembered the wrong side of him. He was always so loud, so _much_ in a way you never were and in a way you needed.

Tears slip past your eyes for the first time since you entered the game without the excuse of laughter when he presses a feather-light kiss to your lips and melts into you the same as Jax. This time it’s a burst of energy, stronger than you’ve felt in years. So much you can understand how Damien could throw himself headlong into gymnastics.

When the euphoria of it fades, though it leaves the heightened energy level, dread fills your chest. You can’t do this. Even if it’s one more conversation, you can’t.

You close your eyes because you can’t face Connor. Not after you left him.

“Sawyer.”

“Sawyer isn’t here right now,” you hiss. “Sawyer didn’t sign up for this shit today, come back later.”

He laughs. It’s muffled in a way you know as him covering his mouth. A hand touches yours, warm and smoother than you remember. “Come on. We both know right now is all we get.”

Your breath shudders, and you open your eyes.

He wears the same outfit he did when you saw _Venom_ together. A dumb gag shirt, galaxy brain with the text ‘a surprise party without the party and just gay aliens’ typed in comic sans that you know he had to have had made in advance for the dumb movie. It almost had you cry-laughing when you first saw it.

Now you just want to cry. You just look at your hand in his so it won’t matter if you do or not.

“Hey,” you whisper, voice hoarse.

“Hey.”

He doesn’t sound angry. He doesn’t sound upset at all, even though you know he should be. You left him in a cave to die. You knew that _going_ to the cave in the first place would end with him buried under a rock and permanently dead because he just had to push you out of the fucking way!

“I’m so sorry.” You choke on the last word.

“Don’t be.” He squeezes your hand. “You did your best.”

“You’re dead.” You glance at his face and the fond smile he wears makes you feel worse. “You do know that, right?”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “I got to go home, though. You remember it, right?”

You stare at him. You feel another crack snap across that glass floor.

“You’re home?” you whisper. “You’re all okay?”

“We’re fine.” He pushes your hair behind your ear and you realize stupidly how long it’s been since you cut it. Or brushed it. You’re a fucking mess. “Worried about you, but fine.”

“I could end this now,” you say, offhand. It probably doesn’t come off that way, not with the tears leaking down your cheeks or the cracks in your voice. “I could come back. I miss you.”

His smile turns a little sad. “If I thought for a second you would, I’d have asked.”

“Hephaestus can’t stop me from dying.” It comes out harsh, but Connor still shakes his head.

“You’ve come this far.” His hands tighten over yours. They meld together instead of applying real pressure. Fear flashes across his face. “Do what you have to do. I’ll be waiting when everything’s said and done.

You close your eyes and try to convince yourself you could disobey Time now. You could go back to the Cube, _really_ see Connor again. Relax in the Lounge and laugh with the Collective. You probably wouldn’t be the Original anymore, but you don’t care! You want to go home!

But.

Connor’s right. You know some other versions of you will kill themselves right now out of spite. You feel them, See them flit away and let themselves die in a risky battles. That’s not you. You aren’t going anywhere without permission.

“God, I wish you were here to tell me I’m overthinking things.” You can’t tell the difference between his fingers and yours anymore.

“You have a good imagination,” he assures you. “You know what I’d say.”

You nod desperately because you can’t breathe. You don’t know if you could say anything else if you tried.

“Go be a hero.” Even his voice is thick now. “Love you.”

You try to choke it back at him, but it can’t get around the lump in your throat. Why didn’t you get a warning about this? You would have been fine, would have maybe been _excited_ , if you’d known. Time’s just being a little shit and you can’t _breathe_.

Connor presses a kiss to your forehead and another wave of emotion hits. It’s not the soft warmth of Jaks or the rush from Damien. Awe touches you, like you’ve witnessed every sunrise and sunset in paradox space at once. Seen every beautiful thing both worlds you’ve lost have to offer. Heard every masterpiece and tasted every work of culinary art.

By the time you come back to yourself, you’re on your knees with your hands rested on a chest like all the others on your land. Solving the puzzle must have unlocked it. It sure as shit wasn’t here before.

It’s better than thinking about anything that just happened.

Though you exist in a state of artificial numb, your hands shake when you lift the lid. It’s lighter than it looks. Like all of the others, the item it holds floats on a cushion of light and game hijinks.

It’s a pen and a strife card.

It looks like a fountain pen, which you don’t actually know how to write with. The handle has separated sections the four aspect colors and an extra white section between Time’s red and Space’s green.

The metal nib starts teal at the bottom and transitions to red at the tip. You wish you’d learned to write with these things. You guess you’ll have to rely on trial and error. It’s not like you have anything else to do.

Still, though. You dragged your friends out of the Cube for a new pen. It’s so small, is it even an upgrade? Your BIG FUCKING PEN has been reliable for so long.

You take it, if only so you aren’t leaving a full chest for an imp to get into. Even if you aren’t using it that doesn’t mean you want it used against you. That thing looks sharp.

You check it with your INFO-DEX (alchemized from a pokemon card, an iPhone, and a Magic Bullet box) more out of habit than anything. More than likely, it’ll end up like the others in your deck. Ready for use, sometimes flung at enemies when needed, and usually passed up for either your pen of choice or your other abstrati.

If a pen doesn’t work, knives and clubs tend to do the trick.

The screen takes a second to load, and it comes up with a description of the pen.

 

> **_Aspectual Fusion_**  
>  _Kind:_ _knife, pen_  
>  _Class: Not-Quite-Legendary_  
>  _Description: Write your next novel, prepare your favorite meal, then demolish assailants. Four aspects, two tools, endless possibilities! Press the corresponding buttons to change settings and fuse those aspects! Use the world to write your story!_ _  
> __Forms Discovered: Plot Hole_  
>  Combos Discovered: None

Okay, maybe you were a little hasty in dismissing this as a weapon. You drop the device and take the ASPECTUAL FUSION back out. You’d better take a closer look at the damn thing.

You hadn’t noticed the circular buttons at the top of each section of the handle right next to where your fingers would be if you were to write with it. You figure each has to have a function related to the aspect it matches. The white button’s a mystery you should probably actually consider before testing at all.

Of course, that’s the first button you press. And, wow, you’re lucky you have the thing pointed away from you because this would be a pretty dumb way to die.

The metal nib vanishes into the handle, which shifts under your hand. It unravels to be wider, to accommodate a different grip. You squint at it, unsure what a pen body would be useful for on its own when a sleek dagger blade shoots out with a satisfying metallic sound.

It has the same red-teal gradient the nib had.

You check the Info-Dex again and the form BUTTERFLY EFFECT has been added. It isn’t much of a leap to figure out how this works. Might as well experiment, it wouldn’t be the first time you sat in a metaphorical pool of your own tears and puzzled over pointless shit.

Pressing the Time button bleeds the red from the blade to leave a teal BRAIN SURGERY. The Mind button gives you a plain POTENTIAL DAGGER. The white button converts it into a PERFECTLY NORMAL FOUNTAIN PEN.

You press Time and Space for the SCIENCE FICTION. Add life to it, get RELIGION, PROBABLY and Mind for GENESIS. Turning it back into a knife makes JUDGEMENT DAY. That naming pattern kinda came out of left field, but you can run with it.

You stare at the knife. Even with all the aspects fused together, the red stays at the very tip of the blade. It makes you think of blackberry thorns. That, or poison.

The thought gets you to stow all your shit away and shamble back out of the cave. You turn the ASPECTUAL FUSION back into a pen and allocate it as your main weapon, though you keep it out. You don’t look back. You don’t even look at the trails. If Time wants you to stay in there any longer, it can suck your dick.

Jack sits with Dipper outside the cave. Their backs are to you, so you hope you can just kinda slip past them. You inch along the wall, but you barely make it a yard before Dippers ears twitch and he twists around to look at you.

:3c mod!!!  
:3c you took forever  
:3c the stabby bug man brought me treats  
>:3c and helped me guard the puzzle for you

“I don’t need guarding.” You hate how brittle you sound.

“Looks like you got a new toy,” Jack says with a nod at the pen still in your hand. Your grip on it tightens. “What’s it do?”

And that’s it. No mention of whatever mess of a puffy face you know you’re rocking. No jabs about puzzles or how pointless this whole thing is.

“I don’t know yet.” You look at the pen again. In the light of Skaia, that tight feeling in your chest has loosened slightly.

You think of the description of the thing. _Use the world to write your story_. That could be metaphorical, or…

You lift the pen and, feeling incredibly stupid, you write exactly what you would expect someone to write when handed a pen. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know how to use the damn pen, it’s not like you’re using ink.

You write your name. You don’t stop when the letters are actually left hanging in the air in a green-red swirl. You only pull the pen back when you finish your last name with a long curl.

“That’s, uh—”

Jack breaks off when the letters start to move. They rearrange, then there’s a faint pop. Time feels weird for a second, a yank on that part of you it communicates with.

And a red-tinted mirror of yourself stands where before there was no one. They hold a pen like yours and stare as blankly as you probably are. Their eyes are just as puffy as yours. You think you know what this is, another thing you don’t know how you know but you still get it at least a little.

You think. The way Time still pulls at you, like you’re an errant dog running too far ahead makes you think so. You could be wrong.

“Huh.” Jack looks slowly between the two of you, a pointed finger following his gaze. “I’m sure you’ve got a helluva explanation for this one, kid.”

You tilt your head one way at the same time the other you tilts theirs. For a second, you think they might actually just be a mirror of you. Then their lips split into a smile without your doing so. You haven’t seen a splinter of you in a long time, you’re a little out of practice. You hold out a hand, and force the muscles used to smile to actually work. “You having as a bad a day as I am?”

They catch it with a nod. “Did Time tell you what we’re doing here?”

“Eh.” You wobble your hand uncertainly when they release it. “Timelines? We’re close enough, the pen just—”

You both make a sound in the back of your throats and bring your hands together in front of your chests. God, that’s weird. You don’t know if it was this weird in the Cube. Were you ever this in-sync with anyone there?

“It’ll be useful in a fight, at least,” they say with a scrutinizing look at their own pen. “Really makes you wonder what an Actually Legendary Pen would be like, huh?”

“Dunno how long we can keep a connection like this up for, though.” The tension from Time almost hurts now. “Better practice more.”

You shrug in tandem, then laugh. You both manage a wave before you have to let go of the connection. They leave no sign they were ever here other than another wave of exhaustion that crashes against the protectively energetic barrier Damien left you.

“Well?” Jack asks. “You gonna share with a rest of us?”

“The two timelines were really close.” Time Lite seems the best way to approach this. “Enough that that Sawyer could come to ours and I could be in theirs without leaving all the way.”

You chat with Jack over a cigarette, then you manage to slink back toward the volcano. Dipper follows you, but it sounds like Jack’s headed back to Derse for a bit. It’ll keep him from poking into your business, at least.

Hephaestus doesn’t greet you at the door anymore. You have a glove to keep from losing a hand and you pretty much have free reign of the place so long as you do a few menial tasks a day and you don’t touch the hoard. He still offers to light the forge for you if you make a more conventional Choice, though.

You haven’t even considered it. You gave up on really winning this game when Connor died.

But, still, you end up numbly carrying hunks of various ores from a store room at one end of his lair to the smithy, or whatever, on the other. You do it silently. If a stray tear sneaks its way out every couple minutes, that’s nothing. No big deal. Nothing to see here.

It takes a few trips to get all he wants over, and every time you walk in you feel Time there. That hourglass drops a single grain of crimson sand each second. It’s not like it _isn’t_ there everywhere else, it’s just hard to ignore here. It’s a spotlight, a personal accusation of who’s really making the decision to stay.

The first trip, you barely glance at the thing. You don’t want to think about it. You have to grit your teeth the second time, the sight of it sends something ugly bubbling up in your stomach. The third, you stand in the doorway with your bucket of unrefined ore. It takes you forty-two seconds to force your feet to take you forward. The fourth time, you don’t even bother to take the ore to the work desk before you stomp over to the plinth. Time throws a red cast over everything this close. You see the paths the sand grains could take when they fall, which way they might go depending on whatever Space shit makes physics work.

“Why me?”

Time doesn’t respond. Of course it doesn’t, it’s Time. It doesn’t care about your feelings. That’s not how it works. Not here, at least.

“You couldn’t have chosen one of the other ones as your ‘Alpha Seer?’” you try again, though you don’t expect any kind of answer. “The one I met today would have been fine. They were so close to this timeline. What’s the real difference?”

“I know it has to be someone, but why _me?_ ”

You _know_ its silence doesn’t mean anything but it still stings.

“You tell me so much, why can’t you just _talk_ to me?” It’s hard to make it through that. The words turn jagged and rough toward the end. Not that Time cares.

Your grip on the bucket tightens until your knuckles turn white. You have shit to do. You turn away with a huff and take the ore to the table with the other buckets. You don’t actually know what any of this stuff is. They’re just rocks to you.

You pick one up, about the size of a softball. You wonder where it comes from. If the consorts mine it somewhere. If it’s just a game construct that respawns on the wrong side of the lair every day. Or Hephaestus just really likes making you lug rocks around for no goddamn reason.

It’s perfect.

You spin around and yeet the fucking rock at the hourglass. It hits with a ridiculously loud and theatrical chime of a clock and gets launched somewhere else much faster than you threw it. The sense of Time doesn’t change at all, no sense of urgency. There’s nothing new in that place it always interacts with you.

“I never asked for this!” you cry, literally. Before, you’d forced yourself not to feel anything, now everything hits you. It skins you alive, forces the static you’ve tried to fend off down your throat. It feels like the lava that pours down the walls, all of it inside you and it’s just so much.

| 

This is stupid.

You know the answers to these questions. You know what you wish Time would tell you. What you wish anyone would just say to you. Because you know it’s true just like you always did. You’re still the same person, after all.  
  
---|---  
  
“No one asked me if I wanted to do this!” You throw another rock, this one meets the same fate as the last. “I didn’t remember anything until it was too late!”

| 

You know Connor would tell you you’re wrong. That it’s more complicated than that.

But the truth is—  
  
—just like before—

You take another rock and this time when you throw it a chip comes out of the glass. The stab of guilt only lasts as long as it takes for another wave of emotion to hit.

| 

You’ve tried so hard not to let yourself break down. Have you really thought about how scared you are? How fucking pissed you are?

—this is all—  
  
—your—

“I could bow out whenever, right?” You can’t even understand your own words anymore. Your incoherence spreads into a litany of babble you can’t really control.

| 

How much you’ve lost?

—fault.  
  
“So, maybe I will!”

| 

Someone’s going to do what Time wants no matter what. For that to happen, everyone else has to fail. You could just be one of many doomed Sawyers. You could go let yourself die a heroic or just death. You could. You could go get the forge lit. See if you can still make that new universe.  
  
You throw another stone and red blots out your vision. You find yourself on your hands and knees and when you blink, red sand covers the floor. It keeps spilling, everywhere. Something in your head doesn’t compute.

| 

Jax never got to see their land.  
  
You look up.

| 

Damien died alone. Gymnastics, his land, both things he loved and both of them killed him. And you chose the wrong dead boy to run after.

| 

Visions of other timelines flash and tease you. The versions of you that kept their temper, held their tongue, and now are doomed. You feel what they feel, in the instant they realize that their time trail isn’t the same anymore. You see the relief when that weight leaves their shoulders.  
  
---|---|---  
  
Everything’s a little warped, bathed in red light. Sand still pours from the hourglass. Streaks of flickering light flow through the air. A pit sits in your stomach, just looking at it.

| 

You let Connor die right in front of you. You knew he would die and you still went on that picnic.

| 

You see the others who sit with you now, who wonder if they’re doing this for nothing. The ones who hate themselves, the ones who never planned on leaving the Medium, the ones who have been injured.  
  
But that’s the thing—it’s a normal anxiety. A ‘you broke this and you’re bad’ anxiety, familiar paranoia. This isn’t ‘you broke the timeline and you’re doomed’ thing. You didn’t fail Time. Even in this, you’re on course. You’re still doing what it wants!

| 

You gave up on the game. You obsessed over your quests to the point of collapse. You smoke now. You lost everyone.

| 

The ones who know nothing of this eventuality because their friends survived. They visit the other lands. They make their universe. They all die later, torn apart in the same cataclysm you know the other doomed timelines are swallowed by.  
  
You curl back down and press your forehead into the still-flowing sand.

| 

And you can blame that on Time all you want. You can yell and scream and throw a million tantrums. You can blame the version of you that put you here, Hephaestus, the game, anyone you want. You can resent the Dersite royalty and pretend you aren’t killing them because a fucking line on the ground is telling you to.

| 

The ones who chose to work with the horrorterrors. Who went insane when they were left alone. Who didn’t prototype Dipper. Who hid and hid until they fell apart. They stalk the void. They don’t care anymore.  
  
And you cry.

| 

But, god, you’re more alone than you’ve ever been and you can’t blame that on anyone else.

| 

A million different choices that could send you home. Everyone you know is on the other side of this game. It would be so easy to leave. To tell Time to screw off and go home. But you’re still here.  
  
Ragged breaths, incoherent pleading, you don’t even understand yourself anymore. You can’t breathe, you can’t drag enough air in to soothe the pain in your chest.

| 

This is your fault. Everything, from the second this universe came into being, it’s all because of you and you can’t _breathe_

| 

More visions hit, of the Cube and where you could be now. Of other versions of you, those with other roles to play. The timelines where someone else sobs in your place over everything they lost. Connor, or Jax, or a million faces you don’t recognize. They’re all doomed because something went wrong. They weren’t who they were supposed to be or you fucked up.  
  
White noise threatens to overcome you. To replace you. You feel it on the surface of your skin, you see it on the back of your eyelids. It forces itself on you and you want to _leave._

| 

You kind of wish you weren’t.

| 

You see desolate sessions where everyone is already dead. You see lands you couldn’t imagine. You see Connor and a flash of blue eyes that twists your stomach. You see…  
  
You don’t know what to do.

Everything’s too much. You can’t see the big picture anymore. All you know, now, is the haze of red and the thrum of Time in the air.

| 

God, you see everything. This is Time. Everything that could be. Could have been. Could still happen. Infinite paths, and this is the one you’re walking. You’re heartbreakingly small, but you’re on the right path.  
  
---|---  
  
Your breath shudders and you fall silent. You don’t want to look at Time again. You don’t want to think about this at all. You just want to go home.

| 

You see yourself, for just a second, in the wrong god tier clothes. Pinks instead of reds. Skirt and tights, split hood, aspect of Heart blazing on their chest. They smile and reach for you. You want to reach back but—  
  
The sand shifts slightly, then Time changes. It swirls, a sound that is somehow the exact opposite of a vacuum. Then the sound of a torn page and you aren’t on the floor anymore.

You stand back at the table with a rock in your hand. You stare at it, at the way it sits in your hand. You don’t feel tired, not physically. Not how crying like that normally get you. Nothing is different.

You look back to find Time intact and unchanged. It sent you back, rewound you. It let you keep all of it, all the memory, thought, and release.

Your head is more in order than it was before. Without our body screaming at you to sleep like it normally would, you kinda get it. You don’t like it, but you think you have a better grasp on the whole… emotional situation. Whether this theoretical Heart player has anything to do with that is a theory to consider and if it is, well. Trans-timeline changes aren’t impossible.

But what you have is this:

In the end it’s all you. You could walk away at any point. You don’t care about being doomed. Not really, not when you actually think about it. That’s not what you’re here for.

You care about the timeline you have to help. No matter how much you hate it, you’ll stay for them. If it gives someone the chance to win, you’ll do that.

If you play SCUBE’s game, maybe it will let you go home. The Cube won’t care if you’re doomed. It doesn’t give a shit about eventuality or destiny or whatever. In the Cube, there are no doomed timelines.

🕗

I open my eyes to Sawyer’s horrified stare. They’re upright again, back against the side of the bed I started on. They’re going to want to talk about it. That’s valid. I probably should. But, god, that look definitely triggers one hell of a knee-jerk reaction. I want to fuck right off, like I always do.

Like _we_ always do.

But they surprise me. It only takes a second for that look to melt away. I can’t read their expression anymore, but they aren’t trying to hide the rest of it. Not the residual emotions they have floating around.

Guilt, expected with how much of that tantrum was about being there in the first place. The fear is still there. Anger, stronger than I expect from their new blank gaze. Everything else pales in comparison to the heavy weight of concern they have me pinned under.

But they don’t ask. Not about that last bit.

“There’s a lot to unpack there,” they meme without any sign of actually joking other than a tiny blip among the cloud of shit they have going on. “So we’ll just go in order.”

They tap a pencil against an open journal I hadn’t noticed in their lap. Damn it, I probably should have skipped the end. It would have been fine to just stop after I got the damn pen. They’d have a lot less fuel to hover over me like I absolutely am aware that we _both_ do.

“What, is this an interrogation now?” I manage to spit out without any real heat. They still wilt a little.

“You don’t have to answer.”

I shake my head and  concede with a flap of a hand. “Just ask. You’ve got a right.”

They hesitate, then glance down. Good lord, there’s a lot of writing on that page.

They end up asking about Dipper and the consorts. I’m kinda vague about it. I mention the weird deaths, but I don’t want to think about it. I haven’t told anyone about that particular part of my session, and this isn’t the time for it.

Then they push me for more information on the agents and how they fit into everything. They gave me people other than my cat and my denizen to talk to, in exchange I agreed to topple their monarchy. That, and Jack got a kick out of it when I torched his office and all the shit he had to do along with it.

It gets a little depressing when I think about the rest of the carapacians and how unlikely it is that I’m going to see them again. They move on without waiting for me to end the discussion. Onto quests, how pointless that was. Not a complete 100% run of my land, not exactly possible without the other players.

Then… they ask about Damien. That thing he said about his actual quests. How he should have been able to save his own life. How he was doing something else instead.

“It took some digging to find it—read digging as jumping through time until I actually found where the hell he’d been that whole time—but he found the lab.” I drum my fingers on my thigh. He hid the fact he’d been there pretty well, too, considering how much he loves the sound of his own voice. “I dunno why he didn’t tell us. Maybe he just didn’t want us to invade LOLAB for a dumb ectolab.”

“LOLAB? Was that intentional, do you think?” they ask with a raised eyebrow.

“The game does shit like that all the time.” I shrug. “The Land of Leaps and Bounds was fun, though. Or, it would have been if it didn’t make me think of Damien.”

They poke and prod about the Info-Dex, which really isn’t that interesting. They have me take it, the Big Fucking Pen, and the Aspectual Fusion out so they can look at them.

They barely glance at the first two before they peer at the fountain pen. It’s set on Biography, just Life activated. They don’t press any buttons, but they do turn it over a few times. It’s weird to watch, especially since I know how their tactile shit works here.

“Not to be _that asshole_ ,” they begin, offering the pen back. “But can you show me how it works?”

“You want me to draw you? Write you into my next book?” I shoot back, though I do take the pen. I laugh at the pseudo-stern look they give me. “Hang on.”

I press a few buttons until I have a Space-imbued Ikea Handbook. I got pretty good at this in the last few weeks I was in the game. I know I still have combos to unlock, even if I found the frankly small number of weapon forms. Always more to do, more to find, but I had it in hand more often than not until I got here.

I mean, I don’t really need a physical weapon in the Cube.

Sawyer says something else, but I’m not listening. I focus on the empty air between us and raise the pen. I just sketch out a ball, nothing fancy.

A second after I pull away, a slightly off-center green ball drops out of the air and into my outstretched hand. I toss it to them with a tired, “Go wild.”

They make no comment while they scrutinize it. Their eyes narrow, laser focused. With a look like that, I can’t help but wonder if they’re going to get something similar in their session. Will they get to play with all those aspects? Will it be stronger than mine?

Or is this particular weapon just a consolation prize for players that lose everything else?

“Cool.” They let go of the ball and it vanishes. Probably to the Lounge so they can be more obsessive later. Since, you know, the Room is off limits. “What about the splinter you saw?”

It takes a minute to really explain. The two timelines were just so close to each other. That pen let us stitch them together between the two of us. It’s not really that complicated, but I’m kind of hardwired to get it. They’re a Heart player so it’s not exactly their thing.

They don’t ask about the shadows of my friends. Not about Time. No questions about my anger, the vision I had of them, my resignation. They leave all of that alone, and I’m grateful.

They don’t look at me. Their gaze remains on their journal. They break a not-so-awkward silence with an uncertain sound that absolutely makes it awkward.

“Should I try to stop it?” they ask, hesitant and small. “The game, I mean?”

I’m not sure if the automatic panic is my own at the idea of them getting cold feet. Or, you know, if it’s the jerk of Time helpfully showing me just how drastically the timelines split. I should probably be careful here. You know, make sure they don’t screw the timelines up and doom the session I’ve gone through such pains to salvage.

“No!” I blurt instead. _Very eloquent._ “Absolutely don’t do that.”

“But—”

“No,” I repeat firmly. I won’t let that kicked-dog expression deter me! This is too important to let them decide that, nah, SCUBE cancelled. “I will take matters into my own hands if you even try, do not test me.”

There’s a lot I don’t say. I don’t say I can and will kill them if I have to. I’ll keep them out of commission until the game starts. I don’t tell them about the relieved endorphins Time floods my brain with when we stay on the right timeline. I don’t need to say anything of the sort. Their intentions might be good, but I can’t let them ruin this.

“Jesus Christ, alright.” They sage past against their bed frame and vaguely wave a hand at me. “Fine, whatever, let’s move on.”

🕘

You’re so tired.

You stand on a platform in front of two broken thrones. You don’t remember seeing them shatter, though when you think on it you can identify the moment they went from being intact to half strewn across the floor. Multicolored currents spark over your arm, your pen ready for another round.

You’re sure the fight was spectacular to watch. You almost feel bad there wasn’t anyone around to witness it. There were a few close calls. The whole thing was pretty intense. Intense, but not particularly difficult.

The queen crouches not far away. Her wrist, the bloody stump it is, drips bright and red through her fingers. More blood than you expected spans the floor between you, a trail to the hand bearing your prize between your feet.

“I know of your deal with my archagent,” she says after keeping her silence throughout the fight. “What do you expect from him in return for such a favor?”

You avert your eyes and kneel down to free the bloody ring. You captchalogue it because you aren’t an idiot. You aren’t about to start a chain of handless former ring-bearers. "Does is matter?"

"No, I suppose it doesn't."

“Hm.” You meet her eyes with a numb gaze. “It’s probably be a good idea for you to leave. The player lands are pretty empty these days.”

Her eyes widen. “This isn’t—”

“I’m good at loopholes.” You twirl your pen nervously. You’re not so worried about Jack being pissed as you are about the fact that Time gave you a choice. That doesn’t happen very often. “I said I’d get rid of you. LOLAB is just as gone as dead so far as Derse is concerned.”

“You would just let me go?” she asks as she slowly rises to her full height. Haaha, she could probably snap you in half if you didn’t have your classpect and this pen to hide behind.

“It’s not like I’m doing anything with the other planets.” You shrug, and it’s not your fault if your voice is a little strained when you say, “It’s free real estate.”

You have to hold your breath to keep the nervous laugh in because of course she doesn’t know that’s a joke. She’s just contemplative and it’s just a normal offer and you just _memed_ at the Dersite queen you were supposed to murder. Or, that you could have left dead rather than having any of this conversation with.

“And Noir wouldn’t follow me?”

You shake your head. “The agents are currently keeping your underlings distracted. Jack would have no reason to even look for you.”

There’s a beat of silence, where she holds her wrist and stares at you. Then she dips her head and regards you with a faint smile. “We truly are victims of fate, aren’t we?”

“Fate doesn’t care enough to victimize us,” you mutter with a downward glance at the line between your feet. You leave the raised platform the thrones once sat on and start for the door. “I’ll distract the agents. You have fifteen minutes to leave the palace unnoticed.”

“You didn’t have to leave me alive,” she says as you pass. “I thank you for my life.”

“Yeah, well, there’s been enough collateral damage in this timeline.” You stop at the door. There’s something else. Another minute or so until you actually leave. So, you look back at the queen. “I’m sorry about all of this, on fate’s behalf.”

She watches you from the center of her destroyed throne room. The flow of blood from her wrist, now wrapped in torn fabric from her dress, has all but stopped. Still regal as hell, even in defeat.

“You won’t be able to defeat my king on your own, you are aware of that?” she asks without malice in her voice.

You shrug. “I don’t intend to win.”

You turn and shove the door open. You need a chat with Jack, then you’ll request the other ring from Prospit’s queen. You never lied to Jack. He’ll get the ring eventually, that much you know.

But you never did say when.


	4. What's a Little Emotional Vulnerability Among Friends?

🕘

I pull the rings out before Sawyer can ask about them. The four beads on each of them make them impractical to wear, so I never do. That, and the paranoia that someone’s gonna come up and cut my damn hand off for the things doesn’t go away just because I left the game.

“I Saw myself give him the ring.” I run a finger over them without looking at Sawyer. “I’m starting to worry that it was the wrong Jack. That I lied to him after all.”

“Is there any way for you to know?” They ask reproachfully. “You said you were close, so—”

“Nothing that actually rules any of the others out.” I shrug and offer them the rings. “I’ll have to meet the Jack in your session to be sure.”

They inspect the rings, the same way they did with the ball. I don’t know for sure what they see. What they get from the rings. Whether they know where they’re going to go, whether they’d keep that information from me if they did.

“I assume you’ve checked our Jack, then?” they ask, narrowed eyes still on the rings. “Just to rule him out, you know.”

I make an affirmative sound. “He has a scar, the one I Saw didn’t.”

“And you know it was _you_ in your vision?”

“I was in my Seer robes, so unless someone else borrowed them…” I fidget with the hem of my tank top. I barely ever wear those robes. Only when I’m going for dramatic effect. I don’t want to know why I felt the need for them in the vision.

Sawyer sighs and hands the rings back. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

I stare at them. The rings, not this other version of me. I almost did give them to Jack, right before I fought the king. If it weren’t for that looming threat of dooming myself, I would have. Instead I promised I would make good on my promise.

But I’m here and I’m not actually sure what happened to the rest of that timeline. It could have fused with others, or simply faded out. Without any players left in it, with its Time player having given up on it, for all I know it could just be gone.

I shrug like I don’t care. The idea of everyone I know in that timeline being dead fills my gut with lead and my blood with ice, but I can’t act like it. Forgetting the fact that Sawyer can probably see my unease, I’m going to lose it if I give myself an inch.

“Yeah,” I agree with a shaky breath. “I guess so.”

🕙

It takes a long time for you to decide not to tell Dipper you’re leaving. It’s a coward’s choice, so you guess it’s in character. That’s not a bitter thought you keep clobbering yourself over the head with, or anything.

There are other people you do need to talk to before you can leave, though. Some will be simple, others… not so much. You don’t want to think that you won’t be back, but everything after the fight with the king is fuzzy.

You absolutely have not been obsessing over that, whoever might say so is spreading hateful slander.

“I’m leaving,” you say without giving a single bother that you’re talking to an hourglass. “You already know that, but I thought I’d say something.”

Time gives no sign it heard you. That’s okay. You aren’t actually leaving it behind, after all. You hope.

Actually, you’re not going to think about that.

“I’m not gonna thank you for any of this bullshit, but—” You reach out and actually touch the thing for the first time. Warmth spreads from your hand to that intangible place Time communicates with you. You can’t call the feeling benign, but you will say it’s _something_. “Uh. Okay, that’s weird. Anyway, I get it. I’m still not happy about it, but I’m not gonna pretend I don’t know the ‘why’s.”

The place your hand touches the glass glows red. The warmth grows, too fast for you to pull back before it starts to hurt. Your handprint remains emblazoned on the glass, stained red.

It left no mark on your hand, but you still feel that heat in your chest. It fades, slowly, and fear replaces it. Time hasn’t ever made direct contact with you other than the time trails. No signs, no flashing lights.

Even when you feel unchanged, that hand remains on the hourglass.

You turn and as close to run as you’ll let yourself. The last thing you need is for Hephaestus to think you’re stealing shit. It’d be just your luck that you’d make it this far then miss the right time for the big fight by pissing your denizen off. When you do run into him in the front workshop, he looks up at you with an unsettlingly excited smile. He has to know what you’re up to today. He always has before.

Which makes his glee even freakier to deal with.

“I get my store room back today, right?” Of course he puts it like that. “You ready for it? It’s a big day!”

You shrug and hop up on one of the emptier desks. “I’ve done everything I was supposed to. I’m not too worried about it.”

Not exactly a lie.

“Oh, I know you can do it,” he assures you with a flare of red in his eyes. “But are _you_ ready?”

You glance down at the hand you touched Time with. You have the wrist attached to it in an iron grip. That’s not suspicious at all, so you force yourself to let go.

“I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do with your coordinates,” you admit. His grin widens, so you continue more out of nerves than anything. “Or how they’re even coordinates? They don’t lead anywhere.”

“You’ll know when to use them!” He crosses the room to get all up in your space. He does this, it’s _fine_. “You have to be careful with temporal coordinates, if you use them at the wrong _time_ , they’ll take you to the wrong place.”

You guess that makes sense. Time shit is still Time shit, no matter how you look at it.

“Where exactly is that?” you ask instead of telling him to back up. God, with his whole fire thing being next to him ratchets the temperature up in the already sweltering room. “It’s blurry.”

He shakes a finger at you and steps back toward the table he was working at before. “You’ll find out. Better get going if you’re planning on doing anything before the big fight.”

You check your phone and if you bend time in your haste to leave, a thin ‘thank you’ tossed over your shoulder, it’s no one’s business but yours. Hephaestus’s laughter follows you out. It’s not a terrible way to leave a place for the last time.

On your flight out of the volcano, you flip through your sylladex and change into your MIDNIGHT outfit. Which is pretty much just a suit and a hat to keep Jack off your back about dressing the right way. You aren’t going to complain about having an excuse to wear a nice suit.

“Noir, where are you?” you drawl into a radio. “It’s time to run Long Live the King.”

“‘Bout time,” Jack’s voice crackles back through. Thank god. “That frog place, we’ll meetcha there.”

Why the fuck are the agents on LODAF?

You agree without asking because you aren’t stupid and change course for Jax’s planet. You’re getting the hang of this patience thing. You end up chatting with Jack over the radio on your way over. It would be fun if there wasn’t this dread hanging over you.

“You’ll get it the next time I see you,” you promise a few minutes later, when Jack asks about the Black Queen’s ring. “I still need it.”

“I’d accept that, ‘cept it sounds like you’re getting the hell outta here.” He blocks the door to your dorm with a glare. “We gotta finish the king off, doesn’t sound like you’re gonna be around anymore.”

You groan. This is so stupid.

“Yes, I’m leaving.” You fly through the gap over his head into the room you used to live in. “But you’ll still get your damn ring, just be patient.”

“When?”

You hesitate and don’t actually look at him while you shuffle around the things you left. You’re mostly here to weaponize your sylladex, which would be a hell of a lot easier if you could find the modified Siri one Jax made you before the game started. Why can’t you just be organized, would that really be so hard?

“I’m not sure,” you admit. “But it’s something I Saw. It was attached to the Alpha timeline, so if you don’t get it it means I fucked up and am probably too dead to feel bad.”

“Look, kid, I like you,” he says, and you glance over to see him rubbing his temples. “But that’s some amount of bullshit. I need proof you’ll come back.”

You stand straight and shoot a quick glare at him. You flip your Keychain modus up and dump everything out of it. You dig through everything until you find the Backpack modus. You stuff a bunch of the things you had held onto to take into the new timeline into the damn modus and toss it to the archagent.

“There.” You leave everything on the floor so you can figure it out after you find the damn Siri modus. “If you really think I’m gonna just bail. I’d die rather than leave that stuff forever. If I don’t come back, assume that’s what happened.”

You kick over a box halfway under your bed and it reveals the card for the Siri modus. You just have to say the name of an item and it’ll be released. It used to be all janky, but Jax fixed the voice recognition. Also, they made it so the velocity of the item’s release matches the volume that you say it.

“Shit, kid,” Jack mutters behind you.

You turn around to find him already looking through the bag you gave him. Makes sense, you guess, to make sure you didn’t just stuff a bunch of random shit in there. Problem is, that means he gets to see that you put the fedora he gave you before you opted for a messenger hat in there. That, and a few other odds and ends you’ve collected from the agents among the other sentimental crap you would rather not part with.

You force everything into the Siri modus in seconds and stand in the bare dorm room. There’s nothing else for you to take. No other reason to put off what the trails are already tugging on you to do. But you still stay, and after a second you catch Jack’s eye while he looks between a couple polaroids you’d taken while the agents quested with you.

“I’m coming back, Jack.” You cross your arms and try not to act as awkward as you feel. Normal people actually emote their emotions, you’d better at least try. “It might take some time, but I don’t exactly want to go home if it means leaving you guys in a dead timeline.”

With that, you’re out of time. You have to get the agents ready for this fight.

🕙

“Thank god I’m not the only one allergic to emotions,” Sawyer sighs with a suppressed snort.

I shrug. “Well, you’ll probably have fun with that in the game. Heart player, and all.”

They grimace. Yeah, they’re gonna have a hard time. The game doesn’t pull any punches in personal quests. A Heart player that refuses to acknowledge their own emotions… it’s gonna be brutal.

“But!” Sawyer rocks forward with a bright grin. “We could probably find a way to get you to your Jack. Maybe we should wait until after my session, but it doesn’t have to be some big impossibility.”

“Maybe,” I agree half heartedly.

“Not everything has to be a federal fucking issue, you know?”

I close my eyes and lean my head against the wall. “Not in my experience,” I mutter.

I’m so close.

🕚

Ghosts of thought ooze through the air. They distract the king so you can catch your breath.

The queen was right. You could never hope to win this fight on your own. As it is, you’re exhausted just trying to keep from dying. You don’t think this would be either heroic or just anyway, but you don’t want to give the game a chance to prove you wrong.

The more you think about it, dying while killing a king for no reason other than ‘Time told me to and I’m bored’ would probably be just. So, like, maybe don’t die.

He swats the last of the teal spirits away and zeroes back in on you before you’re ready. He keeps glitching out, a left over effect from Jax’s prototyping, and that makes the already _massive_ enemy nearly impossible to outrun. You’re small and fast, yeah, but his hand is the size of a double fridge.

Long story short, you’re kind of fucked!

You convert the pen into JUDGEMENT DAY and stab into the air to make cracks in time and space. You figure, what the hell, and pull the knife through the air.

Red shades of yourself and others you don’t recognize dart from some cracks, pale green remnants of dead carapacians come from others. Physical canyons cut through the battlefield alongside more of those ghosts. Once you manage to dislodge your knife from the fabric of space, you throw yourself back into the fight as well.

You can’t really think while you fight this guy. Everything has to be instinct, he’s just too fast. You don’t get a chance to plan unless you manage to distract him.

Which might be why you eventually get too close to him to have a fast enough reaction time.

You slash your knife, which sends a shockwave of biting Mind interference to the king. It works, it distracts him. But when he screams at whatever the fuck that does to his head, his entire body glitches.

You try to jump back, but suddenly he’s too close. He looms above you, he’s shaken off the Mind shit, and he’s _mad_.

You don’t have time to react before a massive fist connects with your entire body.

You don’t know what in your head disconnects, but you seem to stay in the air much longer than you should. You can’t focus enough to call for Time. You get the mental equivalent of error messages every time you try to use your brain.

Then you land.

You don’t move. You can’t. Everything feels so far away. A green bar over your head shrinks, shrinks, until only a sliver of it remains. Guess who’s gonna fucking _die_.

The shadow of the king appears in your vision but you can’t bring yourself to be too scared. Something about this feels right. It’ll be okay.

You understand Time.

You know why you had to do this. You know that if it has to be someone it might as well be you. You know that you could have chosen to do anything but be here and fight the king. You know that. It seems important that you realize that. But you know that if you weren’t exactly here, exactly now, those coordinates would make no sense. You know, even as you watch the king raise his fists and glare down at you, that this is exactly what is supposed to happen.

The king brings his fists down, but you disappear in a flash of red light before they can touch you.

So you don’t see the agents pick up their part of the plan. You don’t see the remaining aspect ghosts whittle down the king’s HP. You don’t see Jack personally cut him down to size. You don’t see this for two reasons.

The first, you are no longer in the timeline.

Second, you’re really fucking dead.

🕚

“I can’t See that timeline anymore,” I tell them. “I could, for the first few days I was here, but now it’s just a vague shape when I try to look.”

“As long as you’re planning on going back they should be fine, right?”

Ah, paradoxes. Hm. That’s a thought.

“That assumes it’s even possible for me to go back, though.” I sigh and shake my head. “It chills my panic brain down, but there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to find my way back.”

Still, I’m gonna keep that thought filed away. They could be onto something here.

“I think I know the rest after that, right?” They pat my thigh and stretch. “I should probably get to sleep. You too, T-B-H.”

I smile weakly and hover off the bed. “Yeah. Thanks for humoring me, Sawyer.”

Their smile turns devious and it takes a second for me to realize that this whole thing was, in fact, their idea. Not mine. Goddamn it.

“No problem,” they assure me slyly. “Glad to be of help.”

I flip them off and replace their room around me with a nondescript hall of the Cube. I have shit to do before the game starts. I’ve wasted enough time on them.


	5. A Job To Do

🕛

You wake up in a too-bright hallway. Your entire body aches, though god tier revival normally leaves you refreshed and whole. It tickles a memory in the back of your head. You can’t quite—

No. This isn’t SCUBE. This isn’t the game.

I’m back in the Cube. I don’t exist in second person anymore. I have to deal with the Cube rules instead of the game’s. The thought pricks the panic centers in my brain until I sit up and find the time trail still in place.

It’s a little janky, a little blurry, but the Alpha line is still clear as day.

I heave myself upright and follow it with the most obvious destination in mind that I can think of. Only one place can show just how different things are in this timeline. How much is broken? How do I know what has to change?

I try to shake the cobwebs of that thought process away when I finally get to the Lounge doors. The sign looks the same as I remember, so do the doors. On the other side, the hall has the same vast windows into the emptiness of the In-Between. There’s no one here, so I half-jog to the door on the other end.

I’m not really sure what I expect to see when I open the doors. I’d like to think the Lounge would be pretty similar, considering it wasn’t _my_ thing. Just a small space for meetings and to decompress.

I don’t expect the dozen-odd tables spaced evenly across a far wider expanse than I remember. I don’t expect to find it busy, only a few tables actually empty. I certainly don’t expect to find two Connors at the bar with Dominic, all three of them in matching aprons.

This is more people than I’ve seen in one place in almost a year.

My throat closes up and I consider leaving. I can try again later, the idea doesn’t trip up the trails at all. Small steps.

Then a thought touches the edge of my mind and I spin around to find the culprit.

My own eyes look back at me. I shouldn’t be surprised since half the people here look like me but this is more than that. There’s a sense of recognition that this is _them_. Not just the Original, though they must also be that, but this is Alpha Sawyer.

“Are you new?” they ask with a bird-like tilt to their head that makes me think of Damien. “You feel like it!”

I stare at them, then I run the edges of my mind over the edges of theirs and _huh_. They line up perfectly, no real difference in how they align. Which makes sense, I’m as close to the Original as we’re probably going to get from my timeline.

I just thought that the game would have torn that away from me, too.

“I’m—”

I look back into the bar and more familiar faces jump out at me than not. Damien, sitting with Jezebeth and Aster. Jay with Jax at another table, a few Striders stuck in the mix. My mouth goes dry when I find Hal’s gaze pointing this direction. I point my eyes firmly back at Sawyer and shrug.

“You could say that, I guess,” I finish lamely. Their eyes narrow, just enough for me to clock and, yep, I’m cutting that off. “I know there’s, like, welcome procedure stuff but can I take a hard pass?”

They hesitate and look at something over my shoulder, which I ignore. After a moment, they nod.

“You look pretty tired,” they say slowly, eyes still not quite focused on me. “I can get you a place to stay for the night and pick this up tomorrow?”

“Perfect.” It’s as good as I’m probably going to get, at least.

I follow them over to the bar, though I slow as we get closer. The three boys are still clustered over there, still stuck in conversation with who must be this timeline’s Vampire. I’d kind of rather saw my arm off than get anywhere near _Dominic Tchaikovsky_.

At the thought, one of the Connors jerks his head around. He looks directly at me with a kind of curious interest that makes my heart ache. Then he whispers something in Dominic’s ear. Though Dominic looks more than a little confused as Connor shoos him off, he seems more than satisfied with the peck on the cheek he’s sent off with.

I already don’t think I like this timeline.

“Ah, a newbie,” the Vampire behind the bar greets us sagely. “You’ll be needing a tour, then?”

“I don’t think so,” Connor cuts in.

I glance at the to find both of them looking at me. There’s the one that sent Dominic off, who looks exactly how I remember. Then there’s… another one? His eyes are red, though.

Both Sawyer and the Vampire—called Jess in this timeline, too, if their name tag means anything—make a curious sound and look at him. How’s that for uncanny valley? They look just similar enough to make the synchronized motion uncomfortable.

Connor doesn’t seem to mind. He inclines his head toward me. “You know Dominic?”

“No.” I look away. “Not in this timeline, at least.”

“Ah!” Sawyer grabs my shoulder and spins me around so I face them. Their look of alarm is enough to make me nervous. “Time shit here to complicate everything, I’m guessing?”

I shrug and make a vague sound. “I’m after a chance to rest more than anything else, to be honest. Time can wait for that, you think you can be that patient?”

That startles a laugh out of them, and they let go. They hold a hand out toward Jess. They barely have to wait at all to have a shiny little key to hand me.

“Here.” The concern hasn’t quite left their voice. “But I know you’ve gotta be here for a reason. I’d like to know it sooner rather than later.”

I shrug again and start to back away from the little gathering. I can’t quite keep my gaze from lingering on the two Connors before I answer.

“I’ll find you soon,” I promise. I glance down at the time trails. The line touches them more times than I can count, a neon beacon telling me that this is an important person. “I don’t really have a choice.”

🕛

I don’t sleep without visions anymore. Sawyer knows that, but only in the abstract. It’s harder for Time to direct me through the trails in a place like the Cube, so it has to use work arounds. I still don’t know more than scraps about this session. I can count on one hand the things I know I have left to do before it starts.

I’ve been in the Cube since 4/13, almost six months. Sawyer’s birthday is tomorrow. So I could have to leave any second.

But I have to go drag that idiot back to the Lounge first. They should know better than to strain themself, especially after slogging through the Underland in three weeks. Then again, I’d hoped we would be in the slight variation of this timeline where they weren’t stupid enough to lock themself in a room with English’s puppet so that’s where my optimism gets me.

Of course, I find them with Connor and V next to the door that leads to the session. They’re going to spend enough time looking at the damn thing remotely, why can’t they have this conversation somewhere else? Preferably, somewhere they can lay the fuck down.

V and Connor both shift to focus on me when I get within some arbitrary range that I don’t give a shit about. Sawyer doesn’t though, their gaze unfocused and pointed directly at the door. I wish I could say I was surprised.

“Is it time?” Connor asks.

I shake my head. Not for what he’s asking about at least. “Soon, but not yet. They gotta go lay down before they pass the fuck out, though.”

“Here’s hoping _someone_ can keep them in check once you’re gone,” V comments with a sharp smile pointed at Connor. “Since they don’t seem to have any impulse control of their own and everyone else likes to enable them.”

Connor shoots a glare at them, and I wave a tired hand to stop that bullshit at the gate. Reading Homestuck was a mistake. This wouldn’t be happening if Sawyer and I didn’t know anything about trolls and their shitty quadrants. I wouldn’t have to watch these idiots fumble through flirting, or whatever, when I kind of have better things to be doing.

“Whatever. I’m not really here to lecture anyone about that—” I cut off and shoot a hand out an instant before Sawyer’s knees buckle like a puppet without its strings. I catch their arm just in time to keep them from spilling onto the floor and I hate that I didn’t even realize that was going to happen until I reacted to it fuck Time bullshit. “Oh, yeah, that’s our cue.”

“Oh, fuck,” Connor mutters.

He takes their weight from me without comment, then hefts them into his arms like the dashing hero he always seems to be. There’s this joke that Sawyer—and I, by proxy—would do anything to protect the Cube and make things go right. That Connor would do anything to protect Sawyer and the Collective. I hope that doesn’t get him killed in this session, too.

“You’d better deal with that.” V sweeps a bland look between the three of us. They turn back toward the door. “I still have tests to run before this thing starts drawing on the In-Between to function.”

The look on Connor’s face tells me he wants to say something to that. Whatever it is stays in his head where it belongs when he sees my face. I am not even in the vicinity of fucking around when it comes to me not having to listen to anyone flirt with anyone else in this timeline.

The time trails aren’t helpful in giving me destinations here, so I just go with my gut. They need a place to rest. I’m gonna be busy all day anyway.

“My room.” I start walking without prompting him to follow. I don’t respond to his sound of confirmation, but it takes me about 0.2 seconds to actually remember to be a little mad that this happened in the first place. “This is exactly what they need to not do, you know that right?”

“I do now.” His voice is bitter, which I don’t expect. “They haven’t told me shit—I didn’t even realize it was this bad.”

Sawyer’s thoughts shift, even if they still remain limp in his arms. I know exactly what’ll wake them the rest of the way up. They’ll deserve it, too.

“They have their radar on, full power, constantly. I’m surprised they’re recovering as well as they have been.” I rest a hand on their head and give them a burst of energy for good measure. Cube abilities > SCUBE abilities. “Three hours locked in a room with that demon’s puppet would put any empath in the hospital.”

Their head moves slightly in my direction, but that’s not what pulls a sigh of relief out of me. They let out a soft grumble and their thin voice croaks out, “Slander.”

The back and forth that follows is nice until Time jerks at me. I stop dead in the middle of the hall and let myself feel it. A ghost of a vision, one I already had, calls to me.

“I have to go,” I hear myself say.

Yeah, go get that shitty puppet and fuck off out of the Cube. That thought hurts so I decide to not have it. I let them know they can use the Room again. Something in the thing I said triggers sharp sadness from Sawyer, but I can’t dwell on that. If everything goes right, I’ll be able to make things right when this is all over.

Right now, as always, I just don’t have time.

▷

Your name is SAWYER PERRY, though no one really calls you that anymore. Because of obnoxious nomenclature bullshit and likely unhealthy amounts of depersonalization, you normally go by THE SEER now.

You don’t know if you’re technically allowed to be in THE MEDIUM before the real players of this game enter it, but that DIDN’T STOP YOU. You’re currently hiding in a back alley on DERSE until the time trails tell you to go see your DENIZEN.

You have a number of INTERESTS, but none of them seem to MATTER ALL THAT MUCH anymore. You’ll have time to like things when your JOB is done. Even if you weren’t so WORRYINGLY APATHETIC, nothing representing your hypothetical interests is present. This isn’t YOUR ROOM, after all.

You’ve done all this before, though the entire situation is A LOT MORE COMPLICATED this time. For example, tomorrow is your TWENTIETH BIRTHDAY, but by your count you’ve been alive for ALMOST TWENTY-THREE YEARS biologically speaking.

So. Seer.

What will you do?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was fun. I hope y'all enjoyed it!


End file.
